NOTES

Chapter One: Henriqueta

  1. Henriqueta: Also can sometimes be found under Henriquetta (multiple sources) or Henri Quatre, James Holman, A Voyage round the World (London: Smith, Elder, & Co.,1834), 107–8.
  2. … market for the slave trade… unsurpassed: D. Eltis, D. Richardson, D. Davis, and D. Blight, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
  3. approximately 44 percent of enslaved people shipped… from Africa: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Slave Voyages, 2019, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database.
  4. working on… plantations or in… mines across Brazil’s: Daniel Domingues da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade from Angola,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 116.
  5. expedient to… work… to death and buy more: Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire; P. A. Aufderheide, “Order and Violence: Social Deviance and Social Control in Brazil, 1780–1840,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1976.
  6. onerous labor… thought to be inappropriate… for most women: Which is not to say women never performed it—Richard Follett, “ ‘Lives of Living Death’: The Reproductive Lives of Slave Women in the Cane World of Louisiana,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 289–304, provides a more northerly example from Louisiana, particularly noting the additional impact the arduous nature of the work and other contextual factors may have had on fecundity beyond gender ratios.
  7. ratios of the enslaved population: Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, 135.
  8. sustaining Brazil’s booming agricultural economy: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil,” 117–18.
  9. ownership stake… in the future: Daniel Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 46–48.
  10. originally named the Griffin: Geoffrey Marsh Footner, Tidewater Triumph (Centreville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1998), 155.
  11. the Bight of Benin: Specifically in Molembo, Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513; a “bight” is a geographical term that simply means a curve, bend, or recess on a coastline or of a river, or a bay that’s created by such a feature.
  12. profiting… approximately £80,000: Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 123; Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” citing Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W. W. Norton; New York: Bonanza Books, 1935), lists the figure as $400,000, which, when similarly adjusted for inflation, is fairly close to the same.
  13. over forty thousand… Africans were trafficked each year to that country: David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 244.
  14. de Cerqueira Lima was… a city councilman that year: J. J. Reis, Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 263.
  15. a fleet of at least a dozen slavers: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 517.
  16. handsome, if blood-soaked, profits: Eltis, Economic Growth, 150.
  17. insuring them against capture by the Royal Navy: P. Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos: du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1968), 404; P. Hudson, “Slavery, the Slave Trade and Economic Growth: A Contribution to the Debate,” in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, edited by C. Hall, N. Draper, and K. McClelland (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), 36–59, for British involvement in maritime insurance for the transatlantic slave trade.
  18. Henriqueta… insured by an outfit in Rio: Great Britain, British and Foreign State Papers, 1826–1827, London H.M.S.O., 357.
  19. treaties forced on them by a foreign empire: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil”; Leslie Bethell, “Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (1965): 761–84; Bethell, Brazil: Essays on History and Politics.
  20. reported by the nearby American schooner Lafayette: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513.
  21. abetted… yet… found by… HMS Maidstone: A third, more middle-ground possibility is that the Lafayette was actually either owned or chartered by de Cerqueira Lima alongside Henriqueta, and thus was detained by the Maidstone and pressured to reveal information about the location of Henriqueta. According to William Pennell, Consul to Brazil, in a letter to Canning about the incident, apparently there was a common practice at this particular historical moment of simply sending two ships for the same journey—profits were such that it was worth it to preemptively send a backup that would be able to make the trip, in this case the Lafayette, if the first ship, here the Henriqueta, was apprehended by the British (British Parliamentary Papers, 11/26-0727, 88). Whatever might be the case in this instance, the end result was nonetheless the escape of Henriqueta and an uneventful arrival back in Brazil for the Lafayette. Great Britain, British and Foreign State Papers, 356–57.
  22. coffles of the enslaved stood packed in barracoons: See Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Oxford, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), for more on the origins of barracoons (137–38) and more generally for a study of a major slaving port crucial to this history before, during, and after the era of Black Joke.
  23. it could be weeks, even months: Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 101.
  24. arrived in Salvador, only slightly delayed: Based on Tinnie’s chart of Henriqueta’s voyages, 111 days from initial departure to eventual arrival this eventful trip wasn’t even the slaving brig’s longest journey, so any delay as a result really was quite minimal. Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513.
  25. one of the most prolific slavers on the coast: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers.
  26. more liable to show its age and wear: Ibid., chap. 8. The French Hébé-class was equivalent to the British fifth rate. (The rating system is based on classifications of ship, not its quality.)
  27. dozens more guns: Sybille carried (or at least was pierced for) thirty-eight guns (eighteen pounders); Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793–1817 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2008), 483.
  28. combat a “piratical scourge” in the Persian Gulf: Memoir of Admiral Sir Francis Augustus Collier (London: G. Myers, 1850), 8–10; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  29. resistance to British economic colonialism: Muhammad Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Routledge, 1986).
  30. prompted some raids of British vessels: James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44.
  31. provoke just this sort of military response: Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy.
  32. a resounding success: Ibid., in chapter 5, explores the action in which Collier participated from a more modern perspective; a somewhat contemporary—and very British—viewpoint on Collier’s activities can be found in Memoir, 8–10. The historiography of the results of the engagement (namely, informal British control of the area for the next 150 years) is explored in James Onley, “Britain’s Informal Empire in the Gulf, 1820–1971,” Journal of Social Affairs 22, no. 87 (2005): 29–45.
  33. on service in the West Indies: J. K. Laughton and Andrew Lambert, “Collier, Sir Francis Augustus (1785–1849), Naval Officer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004.
  34. eliminating… piracy from an entire… area: Memoir, 10.
  35. without which the campaign might have failed: Ibid., 8–9.
  36. disallowed Collier’s wearing of it: Ibid., 10, doesn’t indicate who that sovereign was, but based on the year, Denis Wright, The English amongst the Persians: During the Qajar period, 1787–1921 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 187, indicates it would have been Fath.-‘Ali Šâh (Shah) Qâjâr, who reigned from 1798 to 1834.
  37. recognition from his own government: Memoir, 10.
  38. not… uniformly beloved by his superiors: Ibid., 5.
  39. this was a job: Though this assessment of Collier’s aptitude was drawn from Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8, the characterization of his attitude toward abolition as more workmanlike than not is derived from Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 193–94.
  40. corporal punishment: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 159.
  41. a child’s eagerness to adventure: Memoir, 3–4; Collier was a midshipman, and though most ratings did not yet have a standardized uniform, midshipmen did, as they were officers-in-training, Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1986), 65; that being said, there was a trend toward uniformity that would continue during the era of Black Joke before ultimately resolving into official uniforms in the 1850s, Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 254–56.
  42. great success harassing the American colonists: Naval Chronicle for 1814: Containing a General and Biographical History of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom; with a Variety of Original Papers on Nautical Subjects, vol. 32 (from July to December) (London: Joyce Gold, 1814), 266, refers to the senior Collier’s father as “a private gentleman.”
  43. made him enemies… in the navy: Louis L. Tucker, “ ‘To My Inexpressible Astonishment’: Admiral Sir George Collier’s Observations on the Battle of Long Island,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1964): 297; Julian Gwyn, “Collier, Sir George,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval (revised 1979); J. K. Laughton, “Collier, Sir George (1738–1795),” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 11, Clater–Condell, 339–41 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co, 1887), 340.
  44. product of Sir George’s second marriage: J. K. Laughton and Nicholas Tracy, “Collier, Sir George (1738–1795), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, citing Naval Chronicle, for 1814, 265.
  45. could only be granted for adultery: Sybil Wolfram, “Divorce in England 1700–1857,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 5, no. 2 (1985): 157.
  46. only about 325 occurred: Douglas James, “Parliamentary Divorce, 1700–1857,” Parliamentary History 31 (2012): 169–89; Wolfram, “Divorce in England,” 155–56.
  47. the problems that existed in his first marriage: Though George Collier’s divorce Act seems to have either been printed privately or not at all, as Wolfram, “Divorce in England,” notes was customary, the proceedings and some details regarding the circumstances can be found in Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 33, 1770–1773 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1767–1830), February through April, but particularly March 21–31.
  48. a wealthy merchant’s daughter from Exeter: Presumption of wealth rests on the terms of her father’s will—dated the same year as Elizabeth’s now husband’s death. Will of William Fryer, Merchant of Exeter, Devon, July 7, 1795 (PROB 11/1263/122), National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK.
  49. forced to resign the active command: Laughton, “Collier, Sir George (1738–1795),” 340.
  50. dead by April: Laughton and Tracy, “Collier, Sir George.”
  51. entered his first ship’s books: Francis Collier was assigned to the Magnanime, under Captain Isaac Schomberg, who had in turn previously served as a first lieutenant under George Collier. Memoir, 3, and William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 215.
  52. rarely served… distant harbors: Rodger, Wooden World, 113–15, and Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 99–112.
  53. “complexion fair”; his hair light: Laughton and Tracy, “Collier, Sir George,” citing Naval Chronicle, for 1814, 265.
  54. sought permission to call on Francis’s mother: Memoir, 3–4.
  55. leaving for sea almost as soon as the captain did: Rodger, Wooden World, 276, and Edmund Lodge, Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, vol. 11 (London: Harding and Lepard, 1835), “Alexander Hood,” 1–2.
  56. came with some strings attached: Memoir, 3–4; some of the correspondence between Nelson and Collier’s mother survives and is held in the archives of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
  57. war resumed in May: Ibid., 4–5.
  58. depended on… enslavement… products the practice produced: Just how much of the economy remains a site of historical debate, but a recent and compelling exploration of this relationship can be found in Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015).
  59. immeasurably enriched by human bondage: Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York, Routledge, 2012), chap. 1; Bernard Edwards, Royal Navy Versus the Slave Traders (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2008), chap. 3; under the 1799 Slave Trade Act, the slave trade in England was specifically restricted to these three ports, National Archives, “Britain and the Slave Trade,” http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/pdf/britain-and-the-trade.pdf.
  60. a leading manufacturer of cloth: Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 9, and Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
  61. insatiable craving for sugar: Edwards, Royal Navy Versus the Slave Traders, chap. 2; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
  62. England’s participation in… the triangular trade: Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 43.
  63. eighty thousand newly enslaved… of British extraction: Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 6.
  64. upward of 75 percent of total regional exports: Ibid., 17.
  65. without creating perceptible change regarding slavery: Philip Hans Franses and Wilco van den Heuvel, “Aggregate Statistics on Trafficker-Destination Relations in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Journal of Maritime History 31, no. 3 (August 2019): 625, adapted from Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert L. Paquette, Slavery (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001).
  66. merit the Admiralty’s involvement: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 16.
  67. a comprehensive fact-finding mission: Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 25.
  68. consideration of the movement’s ultimate goals: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 11.
  69. one of several licit ways to make a living at sea: A loose comparison of wages and other considerations that might impact a sailor’s choice of workplace—provided they’d had one—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be made using Rodger, Wooden World, 124–37, Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 15, and Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 209–42.
  70. risking pay in weaker West Indian currency: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 7; Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 110.
  71. switched between seafaring industries: Rodger, Wooden World, 113.
  72. 130,000 British sailors may have worked in the trade: Edwards, Royal Navy Versus the Slave Traders, chap. 3.
  73. piqued the Privy Council’s: The Privy Council is a group that advises the British monarchy.
  74. partway through the trip: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 8, lists figures from the year 1786 by way of example. Out of 5,000 British sailors who worked on slavers, “1,130 men died and a further 1,550 were discharged or deserted ship in the West Indies or Africa.”
  75. tasked with making the new law reality: Thomas, The Slave Trade, chaps. 26, 27.
  76. to avoid detection: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 15.
  77. early captures in the West Indies: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 4.
  78. unassigned to an official squadron or station: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  79. West Africa Squadron to come into being: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 43; however, Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 347–49, provides a differing timeline for when the squadron became official.
  80. Sybille would not fundamentally change: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Appendix C.
  81. the market Britain had (mostly) left: Mostly, but not at all entirely. Eltis, Economic Growth, 47–61.
  82. it was a populace divided: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 126–27; Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000), 108–13, for the diplomatic and political perspective, particularly as it relates to France, in the five years preceding Henriqueta’s capture; Wills, Envoys of Abolition, for division of opinion regarding the mission within the squadron itself over the course of its existence; Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” and Robert Burroughs, “Slave-Trade Suppression and the Culture of Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion, eds. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 125–45, on the interaction between published squadron narratives and public opinion, particularly as the century progressed to its midway point.
  83. the unparalleled speed of his slaver: Lubbock, Cruisers, 140–41.
  84. forced to surrender to boarding from armed British sailors: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8; Lubbock, Cruisers, 140–41.
  85. alter his course forever: Lubbock, Cruisers, 140.
  86. a prize crew of perhaps a dozen men: This numerical supposition is based on Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 103, citing Pascoe Grenfell Hill, Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848; Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1993), in regards to the composition of a squadron prize crew a little over ten years after Black Joke sailed, or forty after Collier came aboard Osprey.
  87. the adjudication of slaving ships: Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 79–93.
  88. make problem sailors someone else’s problem: Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 101–2, mentions that someone noted this practice in the context of American antislavery ships, not British vessels, but given the transient nature of berths for ratings in the navy that persisted during the Georgian era, it seemed like an expedient the Royal Navy might have utilized as well. Rodger, Wooden World, 113, characterizes the transience of sailors thusly: “A man entered for wages on the books of a King’s ship had joined the King’s service until he was discharged or the ship paid off, but in constitutional theory and in everyday practice, he was primarily a member of a ship’s company and not of the Navy as a whole. Men joined a King’s ship or a merchant’s as opportunity or preference suggested, and they moved easily from one to another.”
  89. complement of forty-five sailors: Memoir, 5.
  90. succumbed to disease, insurrections… rebellion: Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 101–2.
  91. Osprey… become its first lieutenant: Memoir, 5.
  92. Admiralty mate named Frederick Mather: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 137.
  93. close to the coast for safety reasons: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 45–47, provides details about why coastal service was necessary at all and some of the issues it presented; David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (1978): 51–52, focuses on the impact on the enslaved.
  94. a voyage of several months: Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 101.
  95. rebellion from their slaver prisoners: “For example, the Brazilian Volcano do Sud, whose crew, when captured by an English cruiser, HMS Pheasant, in 1819, murdered the boarding party and delivered their cargo of 270 slaves at Bahia as if nothing had happened.” Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 29.
  96. “had died from that complaint”: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 3, citing Parliamentary Papers 1828, vol. 26, 89.
  97. no one noticed until morning: Holman, A Voyage round the World, 108.
  98. make the slave trade more “humane”: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 520.
  99. while maximizing profits: Ibid., 516, 522–23.
  100. all manner of insects and pests: Ibid., citing Rev. Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, vol. 2 (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1830), as to why this was likely and what sorts of pests, including but not limited to roaches, centipedes, and rats.
  101. “dense mass of human beings was suffocating”: Holman, A Voyage round the World, 108.
  102. Henriqueta… ready to be tried in court: Captured September 6, 1827, sentenced October 29, 1827. Correspondence (Class A) 1828, 34.
  103. maritime crimes, prize cases, and the occasional commercial conflict: Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions”; Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67–97.
  104. the ability to police the seas: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017).
  105. £900 of his own money: There’s a bit of a historical dispute here as Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513, says it was £330, rather than the Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, figure in the text; £900 in 1827 is worth approximately £98,000 (~$135,000) today, while £330 is roughly £35,000 (~$48,000). I freely admit I have no idea who’s correct and went with the higher number because it demonstrates that, even at their most expensive, auctioned slavers were way more cost effective.
  106. house provincial presidents and Bahia’s governors: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 522.
  107. shipping of enslaved people worldwide: Ibid.; Eltis, Economic Growth, 145–63, for a more in-depth examination of the slave-trade “firm” during the illegal slave-trade era.
  108. made reality far less satisfying: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil,” and Eltis, Economic Growth, 43–46.
  109. American shipbuilding worthy of royalty: Footner, Tidewater Triumph, 155.
  110. rechristened and repurposed, the now Black Joke: Lubbock, Cruisers, 140–41.

Chapter Two: Gertrudis

  1. the titular object of a bawdy jig: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers: (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 141–42; J. G. Muddiman, “H. M. S. the Black Joke,” Notes and Queries 172, no. 12 (March 1937): 200, citing Pierce Egan and Francis Grose, Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: Revised and Corrected with the Addition of Numerous Slang Phrases Collected from Tried Authorities (London: Pierce Egan, 1823), “Black Joke” entry, which states “a popular tune to a song, having for the burden, ‘Her black joke and belly so white’; figuratively, the black joke signifies the monosyllable. See Monosyllable.” The same work defines “Monosyllable” as “a woman’s commodity.” In short (though not monosyllabic), a vulva.
  2. “with a black joke, and belly so white”: History and lyrical variations can be found in the Traditional Tune Archive, “Annotation: Black Joke (1) (The).” Accessed July 21, 2021, https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Black_Joke_(1)_(The).
  3. two Black Jokes had been on the water: Lubbock, Cruisers, 141.
  4. Burla Negra, or “Black Joke”: Natalie Jane McManus, “The Pirate Pathway: The Trajectory of the Pirate Figure in Peninsular Spanish Literature from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century,” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2012, 249–310.
  5. a veritable ocean full of pirates and “pirates”: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 73; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), chap. 29. Obviously British law only applied to British citizens, and likewise when the United States had implemented similar legislation back in 1820. Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 6, explains that Britain did try to convince other European powers to agree that “the slave trade should be denounced as piracy under the Law of Nations” in 1822, but had no takers. Though Britain would use subsequent treaties to add piracy clauses saying as much, that sort of loose consensus wouldn’t be reached until the mid-1800s, as slave trading approached the end of the journey from legitimate enterprise to “crime against humanity,” and not without contention. Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114–39.
  6. for further maltreatment and eventual sale: Lubbock, Cruisers, 155.
  7. existence of ex-slaver tenders… a point of contention: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  8. as much use of former slaver tenders as the Admiralty… would permit: Ibid.
  9. liberated approximately ten thousand enslaved people: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, 1849), 141–42; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 135; J. K. Laughton and Roger Morriss, “Bullen, Sir Charles (1769–1853), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004.
  10. this point of maritime law: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8; State Papers Presented by Command of His Majesty Relating to the Slave Population in the West Indies, on the Continent of South America, and at the Cape of Good Hope: Also, Correspondence with the British Commissioners at Sierra Leone, the Havannah, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, and Foreign Powers, Relating to the Slave Trade, Volume XXVI, Volume 2 (Session 21 November 1826–2 July 1827), Pre–1833 Command Paper, 1827, 36–37.
  11. the Hope, a former slaver: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 128.
  12. an outwardly minor technical point: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8, and State Papers (1827), 36–37.
  13. to whatever end might best suit: HMS Sybille itself was evidence of that—Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), 124, details just a sampling of British ship seizures in the most recent conflict with France alone.
  14. nations in their own right: Leslie Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil and the Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” Journal of Latin American Studies 1, no. 2 (1969): 115–47.
  15. Canning, a vocal proponent of abolition: Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 111–13.
  16. “the Treaties for the repression of the Slave-trade”: State Papers (1827), 37.
  17. ship that supervised it had done the deed: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8. Indeed, the High Court of the Admiralty had actually issued letters of marque to two privateers to catch slavers after abolition of the slave trade went into effect. Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 4.
  18. supportive of the WAS efforts: Canning would, within months of sending this letter, move on up the political ladder to the position of prime minister. Within a year and a half he’d be dead. Derek Beales, “Canning, George (1770–1827), prime minister and parodist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., 2011), article published September 23, 2004; last modified September 25, 2014.
  19. expensive and time-consuming: Lubbock, Cruisers, 169–99, for discussion of British shipping design efforts and costs during this era.
  20. press gangs… had ceased by 1815: Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 32–33, 171–72, marks the end of the practice of press gangs to this year, but takes especial pains to note that impressment as a concept—as a right retained by the government in war—was not particularly disputed, did not cease then, and laws sanctioning it have never been repealed.
  21. the pesky British tendency to impress American nationals: Gerald S. Graham, Empire of the North Atlantic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 237–42.
  22. employed only 20,000 just five years later: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Admiralty (Suffolk, UK: Terence Dalton, 1979), 93–94.
  23. concerned… sailors… would also be put out of work: Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1964), 37.
  24. the Industrial Revolution: When defined as 1760–1840.
  25. fifty-four near copies finished or under construction: William Q. Force, Army and Navy Chronicle, and Scientific Repository: Being a Continuation of Homans’ “Army and Navy Chronicle,” vols. 1–3 (Washington, DC: Wm. Q. Force, 1843), 629.
  26. Successful innovations… not yet forthcoming: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9, though the author does highlight that the frigates, at least, were not without some advantages on the coast, not the least of which was that their larger crews could sustain the losses that staffing tenders required. Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W. W. Norton; New York: Bonanza Books, 1935), 156, and Lubbock, Cruisers, 169–99, detail the progression of the improvements in British naval ship design when they did arrive in the 1830s.
  27. crafting progressively faster ships: Chapelle, History of American Sailing Ships, 130–31, 133, 150–52.
  28. putting out arguably the best ships on the water: Ibid., 144, referencing William James, The Naval History of Great Britain (6 vols.) (London: Richard Bently, 1837).
  29. double the speed of the frigates: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 149.
  30. privateers became a model for slavers: Ibid., 158.
  31. “race-horse beauty”: Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 161.
  32. northeastern United States… Chesapeake (Baltimore) region… integral to the… trade: Howard I. Chapelle, The Baltimore Clipper: Its Origin and Development (New York: Bonanza Books, 1930), 8–14, on what that author believes to be the most probable history of the origins of the Baltimore clipper; Id. at 107–8, and Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 154, on the relationship between Baltimore clippers, the War of 1812, and the slave trade; Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 26–27, 83–85, for Baltimore’s involvement with international trade; Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 44, 49–50; and Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 17, 68, 78–80, on the interaction of slavery and shipyards in Rhode Island and Baltimore, respectively.
  33. strongly influencing their design: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 154–155, 158–61; Chapelle, The Baltimore Clipper, 107–11; Joseph Goldenberg, “Shipbuilding,” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 2, L–Z, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 583–84.
  34. two ports simply wasn’t worth the risk: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 158.
  35. several ways to be murdered on a slave ship: Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship (New York: Penguin, 2007); Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (1978): 47–64.
  36. loss of life… acceptable… to maximize profits: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 158; Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta and Her Evil Sisters,” Journal of African American History 93 (2008): 520–22.
  37. the slave deck: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513, 515; Chapelle, The Baltimore Clipper, 110; Goldenberg, “Shipbuilding,” 584; Rediker, The Slave Ship, chap. 10; Larry Gragg, “Middle Passage,” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 2, L–Z, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 434; and Daniel P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 106–7.
  38. temperature… surpassed ninety degrees: Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 106–7; Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 515, citing Rev. Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, vol. 2 (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1830), 481–82; and Rediker, The Slave Ship, chap. 2.
  39. a place to retreat in the event of an uprising: Rediker, The Slave Ship, chap. 2, and Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 143–49.
  40. cheaper to put into use than… England’s best: The rationale behind the Admiralty’s resistance remains a mystery. Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  41. a tenth, even a twentieth, of the cost: For instance, using figures from Lubbock, Cruisers, 199, one can compare the size and cost of the American-built, Sierra Leone–auctioned Henriqueta, £330/£900 (roughly £35,000/$47,000 or £98,000/$135,000 today) for a ship about 260 tons burthen with a single pivot gun, to that of the English-built HMS Bonetta (1836), 319 tons burthen with three guns, but at a price of £6,510 (or approximately £692,500/$939,500 today). And Bonetta was one of the cheaper ships the yard put out during the 1830s.
  42. the elements of their construction documented: Lubbock, Cruisers, 142, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11, and fn. x.
  43. quality, gently used shipping at an extremely low price: Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 79–93; and Padriac Xavier Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” Past & Present 225 (2014): 113–42.
  44. any benefits weren’t worth the risk of scandal: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chaps. 8 and 9.
  45. near-complete control of internal policy: A list of members of the Admiralty and Navy Boards during this (and indeed, most any) era can be found in Rodger, The Admiralty, 91–92.
  46. his expedient… had worked: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  47. allowing the ship to fall back into a slaver’s hands: Ibid., chap. 9.
  48. only the buying, selling, and shipping of the enslaved was forbidden: David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).
  49. necessitated positive public opinion: Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 248, asserts that the influence of British public opinion on the slave trade was at its zenith during the 1820s; Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 123, on the power and influence of liberal public opinion in regards to naval strategy; Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 110, regarding how less than glowing accounts and descriptions of service in the navy were disincentivized.
  50. not brook… Britain doing anything that might facilitate the trade: See, e.g., abolitionist reaction to the results of the Congress of Vienna in Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 25–33.
  51. righteously snuffed out: Richard Huzzey, “The Politics of Slave-Trade Suppression,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, eds. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 17–22; Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 165; and Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 29.
  52. the power to judge those so captured: James Bandinel, Some Account of the Trade in Slaves from Africa as Connected with Europe and America from the Introduction of the Trade into Modern Europe, Down to the Present Time (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1842), 126–32, 150–63; Leslie Bethell, “Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (1965): 761–66; Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historians, “Slavery in Diplomacy: The Foreign Office and the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” History Notes 17, Britain: The Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, 2013, https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_notes_cover_hphn_17; and J. P. van Niekerk, “British, Portuguese, and American Judges in Adderley Street… (Part 1),” Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa 37, no. 1 (2004): 1–39.
  53. an ongoing process of spectacular collapse: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 159–60.
  54. previously stipulated obligations of its former rulers: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil,” 120–21.
  55. honor Portugal’s previous agreements with Britain: Leslie Bethell, Brazil: Essays on History and Politics (London: University of London Press, 2018), 57–66.
  56. subject to legitimate capture by the British: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil,” 115–47.
  57. reasons to deceive… and plenty of practice: A sampling of examples: Bernard Edwards, Royal Navy Versus the Slave Traders (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2008), chap. 5; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 12; and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chaps. 4 and 6.
  58. “a picture of the most agreeable character”: Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833), 38.
  59. what was then known as interest: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 27–28, and Rodger, Wooden World, 273–302.
  60. a man and an officer: Rodger, Wooden World, 119–24.
  61. Black Joke would be led by a lieutenant: The practice of the second-in-command on a larger ship being a commander was completing the process of becoming standard practice by 1827 (Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 86), so despite the fact that Turner already did this job on Sybille, he was still a first lieutenant at this juncture.
  62. even the occasional petty officer: Specifically master’s mates. Nicholas A. M. Rodger, Naval Records for Genealogists (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1988), 18.
  63. the rank was distinct from the duty: Ibid., 15, and Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 84.
  64. more officers than berths to contain them: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 78–84.
  65. it took all three… to advance… to post-captain: Rodger, Wooden World, 263, 273–302.
  66. comparative relaxing of class distinctions: Ibid., 252–72.
  67. an officer who could not help their career: Ibid., 275–77.
  68. could… completely destroy the career: Ibid., 280.
  69. Nelson… notorious personal life: Michael Ryan, “Lord Nelson: Hero and… Cad!,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lord-nelson-hero-andcad–105811218/.
  70. demand… outstripped the supply of available commissions: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 72–88.
  71. the backroom coin of the Royal Navy: Rodger, Wooden World, 282–83.
  72. William Turner… second berth on Sybille: O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 1215.
  73. the new brig’s captain: Lubbock, Cruisers, 140.
  74. until he was thirteen or fourteen: Edward Cave, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, vol. 220 (January–June 1866) (London: Bradbury, Evans, & Co., 1866), 297. He would have been born in 1802 or 1803 and entered the Navy in 1816.
  75. the gentlemen’s class with whom he had to compete: Rodger, Wooden World, 254.
  76. a village near Portsmouth: Bedhampton Historical Collection, “The Time Travellers Guide to Bedhampton Village,” January 2019, https://secure.toolkitfiles.co.uk/clients/21710/sitedata/files/Time-Travellers-Guide-to-Bedhampton-Village-2019-02–18–121424.pdf, 3-4.
  77. the complications involved in procuring French wines: Gavin Daly, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers,’ 1810–1814,” Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 333–52, especially 337.
  78. a centuries-long reputation for heavy drinking: R. C. Riley and Philip Eley, Public Houses and Beerhouses in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth (Portsmouth, UK: Libraries, Museums and Arts Historical Publications Sub-Committee of the Portsmouth, 1983), 3–4.
  79. constant improvements to the family’s country estate: Bedhampton Historical Collection, “The Waterloo Room at The Elms: ‘The Gem of Bedhampton,’ ” https://secure.toolkitfiles.co.uk/clients/21710/sitedata/files/The%20Waterloo%20Room%20at%20The%20Elms.pdf, 1–2.
  80. the grip of an economic downturn: Bedhampton Historical Collection, “The Time Travellers Guide,” 1.
  81. then the largest known industrial complex: Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 27.
  82. attractive option… to progress their families socially: Rodger, Wooden World, 266–67.
  83. return to the Sybille’s quarterdeck: O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 1215.
  84. jaunt back to Freetown: Lubbock, Cruisers, 141.
  85. a war of words: David Lambert, “Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery,” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 103–32.
  86. schools and churches aplenty: Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations of Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1827).
  87. public dinners, and all-night dancing: James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 308–9.
  88. better suited to the climate: Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated.
  89. disorganized and ill-fated arrival of the first settler colonizers: Accounted historically in Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 13–52, and contemporaneously, at least between 1791 and 1793 and from a British perspective, by Anna Maria Falconbridge, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone, During the Years 1791–2–3, in a Series of Letters (London: Anna Maria Falconbridge, 1794). Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 1–12, provides a brief overview of the history of Sierra Leone from European contact in the fifteenth century; and P. E. H. Hair, “Aspects of the Prehistory of Freetown and Creoledom,” History in Africa 25 (1998): 111–18, explores the Portuguese influence on Freetown’s evolution.
  90. the brig was a mere extension of the frigate: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  91. cut a distinct profile: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 156, 158. “Rake” simply refers to the angle of something, in this instance, “the inclination of the stem and sternpost beyond the ends of the keel; also, the inclination of the masts from the perpendicular,” J. Richard Steffy, “Illustrated Glossary of Ship and Boat Terms,” in The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, eds. Ben Ford, Donny L. Hamilton, and Alexis Catsambis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), a not uncommon adjustment in clippers engineered to perfect a ship’s buoyancy, balance, and/or motion through the water, John W. Griffiths, The Progressive Shipbuilder, vol. 2 (New York: John W. Griffiths, 1876).
  92. “a most symmetrical specimen of naval architecture”: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 156, 158; Lubbock, Cruisers, 141; and Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 131.
  93. barely room to breathe, much less move: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 512.
  94. two days in Sierra Leone in early January: Henry Downes, Logbook of HMS SYBILLE and HMS BLACK JOKE 1827–1829 (LOG/N/41). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
  95. purchasing the Henriqueta at auction: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta,” 513.
  96. the area had traded in people, and only people: Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 32.
  97. capturing its first slaver: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  98. John Ouseley Kearney: Thomas, The Slave Trade, chap. 32.
  99. sailing alongside the Sybille and HMS Esk: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 141.
  100. his ship taken with little fuss: “Portsmouth, Saturday March 29, 1828,” Hampshire Telegraph (March 31, 1828); Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 20.
  101. condemned… processed into Freetown: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 20.

Chapter Three: Providencia

  1. over a thousand slave voyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
  2. no combatant… better shape than England: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), 150.
  3. “formal” control of territorial possessions: Ibid., 152.
  4. England’s overseas interests actually increased: Ex: James Onley, “Britain’s Informal Empire in the Gulf, 1820–1971,” Journal of Social Affairs 22, no. 87 (2005); Britten Dean, “British Informal Empire: The Case of China,” Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 14, no. 1 (January 1976): 64–81; Martin Lynn, “British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, by Porter, Andrew, and Wm Roger Louis, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999, Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011).
  5. a base capable of comparatively rapid response: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 154; Kennedy also cites Graham, Empire of the North Atlantic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 264, who has an even more detailed list accompanied by additional information regarding the strategic value of some of these particular holdings for British sea power.
  6. Royal Navy was a primary mechanism: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 157.
  7. the golden age of piracy ended: Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 8, defines piracy’s golden age as between “roughly 1650 to 1730.”
  8. the waters were nonetheless rife with predation: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 164–65.
  9. precipitated a particular rise in nefarious activity: J. L. Anderson, “Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 194.
  10. protected them from interference: Howard Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W. W. Norton; New York: Bonanza Books, 1935), 130.
  11. pirates were the bane of nearly all: Anderson, “Piracy and World History,” 194.
  12. the cost of protective measures: Ibid., 179.
  13. served British trade interests rather well: Oded Lowenheim, “ ‘Do Ourselves Credit and Render a Lasting Service to Mankind’: British Moral Prestige, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Barbary Pirates,” International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003): 23–48 (35–43).
  14. universal cessation of slave trading: Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1964), 154–55.
  15. pervaded many of the intellectual and diplomatic circles: Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 194, 201, 203.
  16. not yet reached their future popularity: Ibid., 208–10.
  17. national self-interest, not altruism: Ibid., 223–24.
  18. a relatively simple matter… before the Congress began: Ibid., 202.
  19. newfound antislavery political attitude: Lowenheim, “ ‘Do Ourselves Credit,’ ” 39–44.
  20. regularly ransomed, rather than sold, back to Europe: Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 214–15.
  21. eradicate the Barbary pirate problem in 1816: Lowenheim, “ ‘Do Ourselves Credit,’ ” 30–35.
  22. role of the Royal Navy in the coming age: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 164–65, notes that the eradication of Barbary piracy in the area wasn’t accomplished until 1830.
  23. the signatories’: England, Austria, France, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain, and Sweden. James Bandinel, Some Account of the Trade in Slaves from Africa as Connected with Europe and America from the Introduction of the Trade into Modern Europe, Down to the Present Time (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1842).
  24. “no proper means for accelerating that period are to be neglected”: Ibid., 148–49.
  25. the Netherlands and Denmark… moved to abolish: Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 284–89; Denmark had gone the gradual abolition of the trade route, so it should be noted that its gradual decrease was preceded by several years of aggressively stockpiling an enslaved population in its Caribbean holdings, Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 97, 169.
  26. a robust domestic slave trade: Drescher, Abolition, 118–19, 127, 296, 311.
  27. British abolition left a market vacuum… to fill: David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52–53.
  28. met with their opposite numbers from Portugal and Spain: Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 202–4.
  29. any reason to simply acquiesce to British demands: Bandinel, Some Account of the Trade, 126–30, and Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 4.
  30. Portugal… was to be paid… with additional payments to come: This was less than a third of what England ultimately ended up paying to Portugal alone by 1853, Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 4.
  31. Mixed Commission… established in Sierra Leone: Leslie Bethell, “Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (1965): 763–64.
  32. Mixed Commission to be established in Cuba: Bandinel, Some Account of the Trade, 160.
  33. slave trading south of the equator: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 4.
  34. less interested… right to search French ships: Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 197–98, and Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000), 63–67.
  35. make any other move to prevent human trafficking: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 76, and Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 6.
  36. “right of search”: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 63.
  37. a nonnegotiable feature of British foreign relations: Edward Keene, “A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century,” International Organization 61, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 311–39.
  38. an international naval force: Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 216–17.
  39. and again the next year: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 64–65.
  40. fought a war… over this very issue: It would continue to be a contentious issue with the United States for decades to come. William Beach Lawrence, Visitation and Search: or, An Historical Sketch of the British Claim to Exercise a Maritime Police over the Vessels of All Nations, in Peace as Well as in War (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1858).
  41. “any of His Majesty’s Ship or Vessels of War”: Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807, 47 Geo. III, c. 36; the language in the subsequent Felonies Act (1811) is almost exactly the same. British and Foreign State Papers, 1817–1818 (London: James Ridgway and Sons, 1837), 575.
  42. weren’t ships available to create a dedicated patrol: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 43.
  43. what was supposed to happen next: Padriac Xavier Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 67.
  44. Derwent… Solebay: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 43.
  45. a misdemeanor… to a felony: British and Foreign State Papers, 571–76.
  46. a relatively simple endeavor: Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 81.
  47. astronomical returns on investment still brought enslavers: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 4.
  48. Yeo… Columbine… Irby… Browne: Ibid., Appendix D.
  49. “no less than eighty” like-missioned vessels: Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham, University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 28.
  50. “stipulations contained therein”: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 43–44.
  51. the Squadron was tiny: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 6.
  52. little help would be forthcoming: Ibid. The colonial schooner Princess Charlotte didn’t stay serviceable for long and was replaced by a captured brig then renamed Prince Regent, and Queen Charlotte, also a captured vessel, joined the colonial side of the efforts. Inconstant didn’t stay serviceable for long, either, and its crew was later transferred to HMS Semiramis. Despite these changes, however, and the fact that captured ships were already doing some work as tenders, the official number of Royal Navy ships available for deployment during Yeo’s tenure maxed out at two.
  53. were as yet uninterested: Eltis, Economic Growth, 94–96.
  54. Domestically the situation was little better: Ibid., 90–94.
  55. send those ships… to guard Napoléon instead: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 100.
  56. natural harbors… confined to the major slaving rivers: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 45–47; Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter, 35–36.
  57. practically give the information away: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 164–65; Captain William Fitzwilliam Owen, who will join the narrative later, was one such surveyor before his subsequent time on the coast as the administrator of Fernando Pó, charting the coasts of Africa both east and west, the latter from the Congo to Gambia Rivers, and it was then that he’d managed to earn the ire of Commodore Bullen. Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  58. instructions would have to be more honored in the breach: Hamlet (act 1, scene 4). I had to look it up myself, so hopefully this saves you some trouble if you’re likewise inclined.
  59. lengthen a two-week cruise along the coast to over five: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 45–47; by way of extreme example, Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 101, recounts a prize-ship trip that should have been three weeks and instead took nearly five months.
  60. Yeo… would die from illness: J. K. Laughton and Michael Duffy, “Yeo, Sir James Lucas (1782–1818), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004.
  61. the size of the Squadron would again stall: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Appendix C.
  62. quantity of enslaved… exported… would precipitously rise: These figures are from Eltis, Economic Growth, 250; however, more recent data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database suggests the numbers are distinctly higher, closer to almost 62,000 in 1815 to over 112,000 in 1829.
  63. number of ships… near stagnant… through 1832: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Appendix C.
  64. Opponents… declared the goal… impossible: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, Prologue.
  65. outnumbered by slave traders by almost thirty to one: 228 slave voyages embarked enslaved people from Africa in 1827 (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database), divided by 6 WAS ships, excluding tenders (Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Appendix C), is 38.
  66. Royal Navy… notably low-cost: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 150.
  67. £60 million to £100 million per year: Eltis, Economic Growth, 92.
  68. Royal Navy usually held the advantage: Daniel K. Benjamin and Anca Tifrea, “Learning by Dying: Combat Performance in the Age of Sail,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 4 (2007): 968–1000; Thomas Malcomson, Order and Disorder in the British Navy, 1793–1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 74–80.
  69. promotion and… prize money: Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 231–42; Padriac Xavier Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” Past & Present 225 (2014): 113–42; Daniel K. Benjamin and Christopher F. Thornberg, “Comment: Rules, Monitoring, and Incentives in the Age of Sail,” Explorations in Economic History 40 (2003): 195–211; Daniel K. Benjamin and Christopher Thornberg, “Organization and Incentives in the Age of Sail,” Explorations in Economic History 44 (2007): 317–41.
  70. promotion ladder was congested and opportunities few: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 58–59, 61–63.
  71. only 3 percent of… personnel… West Africa in the late 1820s: Eltis, Economic Growth, 92.
  72. one in ten officers were fully employed: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 68–70.
  73. territory… divided at first into four sections: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 45.
  74. Senegal… the equatorial line: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  75. resupply in Fernando Pó: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 252, and Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 22–24.
  76. rest and refresh in Ascension: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chaps. 3 and 6.
  77. prizes… near the Bonny and Calabar Rivers: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  78. trolled for information: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 5.
  79. Black Joke had forty-three men on board: John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Part 3 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 297–98.
  80. finally “the watch was set” at eight: Brian Lavery, Life in Nelson’s Navy (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2007), chap. 4.
  81. likely leaving his boatswain, Harvey: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 1215.
  82. may… sleep on deck: Lavery, Life in Nelson’s Navy, chap. 4.
  83. in position to pounce: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  84. receive an £8 bonus: Ibid.
  85. Coates, who acted as chief medic for the tender: Joseph Allen, The New Navy List and General Record (London: Parker, Furnivall, and Parker, 1850), 175, lists Coates in this position for a subsequent action under Turner, so I have inferred his presence here.
  86. and nothing to sneeze at for them, either: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 212–13.
  87. those particular characteristics… that might mark a slaver: Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 159.
  88. usually a short-lived mystery: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  89. agricultural exploitation rather than human trafficking: Eltis, Economic Growth, 164.
  90. Black Joke first sighted the Providencia: Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 141–42.
  91. 10 percent… under French or US flags: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; 1,069 ships are listed leaving the area from 1825 to 1830, 135 of them flew the flag of France or the United States. It was not an even distribution, as almost all these ships were French.
  92. the resources to acquire fake flags: Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4–5.
  93. solid-white flag of France’s Bourbon restoration: France’s flag changed with its system of government, so, though it had been the tricolor we’ve come to expect and would be again, during this historical moment, yes, it was an entirely white flag.
  94. Dutch vessels were scarce on the water: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
  95. apprehended… less than a fortnight previous: La Fanny, flying a French flag. Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  96. not above lying their entire faces off: David Joseph Blair, “All the Ships That Never Sailed,” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014, 245–311.
  97. lie of the vessel’s actual affiliation: The question of how to consistently determine a ship’s nationality for the purposes of adjudication would be an issue of unagreed upon international maritime law between Britain, Portugal, and Brazil for some years yet. Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 16.
  98. carry multiple commissions: See, e.g., the aforementioned La Fanny.
  99. depending on… position relative to the equator: Lubbock, Cruisers, 115.
  100. pretend not to speak English at all: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  101. personally liable for… his mistake: Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 88.
  102. indemnify… against reasonable error: Benjamin and Thornberg, “Organization and Incentives,” 198.
  103. redress for slave ships illegally captured: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 6.
  104. already an exceptional occurrence: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 19–32.
  105. sizable increases in income: Ibid., 209–48.
  106. mechanisms of social mobility: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1986), 263–72, discusses what the promotion system previously looked like for officers in the long eighteenth century, compare to Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 101–2, for the nineteenth-century shifts.
  107. hoisted the Red Ensign: John Marshall, Royal Naval, Vol. 3, Part 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831), 297.
  108. used to indicate a British merchant or passenger ship: Robert Carse, The Twilight of Sailing Ships (New York: Galahad Books, 1965), 60. For the visually inclined, it has a solid red field and a Union Jack in the upper left corner.
  109. now identifying itself as Spanish: Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 142.
  110. Turner and his speaking trumpet: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5, notes the regular use of speaking trumpets in service on the coast, as otherwise it would be very difficult to be heard on another vessel in many circumstances.
  111. “no boat that could swim”: Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Vol. 3, Part 1, 297.
  112. demanded to see the Black Joke’s identification papers: Lubbock, Cruisers, 143.
  113. the diversity of faces that graced its navy: I draw this conclusion by way of the example provided in Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 60–61, of HMS Victory at Trafalgar, on which the author notes there were, in addition to likely populations of British-born Black seamen and possible pockets of Canadian and US-born ones who are difficult to distinguish from their White crewmates on account of Anglicized naming conventions, “small numbers of seamen of other nationalities including Swedish, Dutch, Maltese, Italians, Portuguese, Danes, Russians, Indians and even Frenchmen—22 Americans, nine West Indians and one African.” And despite the complaints of the United States, odds are that many volunteered, rather than being impressed. J. Ross Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 149–50.
  114. the ubiquitous Kroomen: John Rankin, “Nineteenth-Century Royal Navy Sailors,” African Diaspora 6, no. 2 (2014): 179–95; John Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, eds. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 95–121.
  115. sometimes flamboyant: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 254–58, and Lavery, Life in Nelson’s Navy, chap. 4.
  116. jib… used… to identify the nationality of a ship: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 757, for a more technical definition of a jib; The Naval Chronicle, for 1805: Containing a General and Biographical History of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom; with a Variety of Original Papers on Nautical Subjects, vol. 14 (from July to December), (London: Joyce Gold, 1805), 97, for evidence of the genesis of the idiom, even though the word “jib” is not actually used.
  117. the two empires fought to retain their colonial holdings: D. A. G. Waddell, “British Neutrality and Spanish-American Independence: The Problem of Foreign Enlistment,” Journal of Latin American Studies 19, no. 1 (1987): 1–18; Leslie Bethell, Brazil: Essays on History and Politics (London: University of London Press, 2018), 62–64.
  118. joined the naval effort for South American liberation: Waddell, “British Neutrality.”
  119. Thomas Cochrane, the Sea Wolf: Ibid.; Bethell, Brazil: Essays on History and Politics, 63, citing: Thomas Cochrane, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chile, Peru and Brazil, from Spanish and Portuguese Domination (2 vols.) (London: James Ridgway, 1858–59); Brian Vale, Independence or Death! British Sailors and Brazilian Independence, 1822–25 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); and Brian Vale, The Audacious Admiral Cochrane (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2004).
  120. better at aiming than their average opponent: Rodger, Wooden World, 56–59; Geoffrey J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Sea Power in the Georgian Era (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 39–40; Jeremy Black and Cheryl Fury, “The Development of Sea Power, 1649–1815,” in The Social History of English Seamen, 1650–1815, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), 5–32 (24).
  121. “intrepidity and judgment on the occasion”: Account of the Black Joke’s encounter with the Providencia is compiled from the following sources: Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Vol. 3, Part 1, 297–98; Lubbock, Cruisers, 143–44; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 142; O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 1215; and Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter, 123–24.
  122. a sword worth £220: In O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 1215, the actual figure given is 200 guineas. A guinea was worth £1 s.1, or one pound one shilling. There was a massive recoinage in 1816 that eliminated the guinea and replaced it fully with the pound, but apparently guineas had a more “aristocratic” association and continued to be used as reference for luxury goods, like, say, superfancy engraved swords.
  123. over a year and a half of a lieutenant’s sea-pay: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 212. Monthly pay for a senior lieutenant was £11 s.14 at the time the Black Joke sailed, there are 20 shillings in a pound, so 220/11.7=18.8 months.
  124. “gallantry while Lieutenant-commanding the Black Joke tender”: O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 1215.
  125. Harvey… was also promoted: Ibid., and The Navy List, Corrected to the 25th of September, 1828 (London: John Murray, 1828), 28.

Chapter Four: Vengador, Presidente & Zepherina

  1. the Black Joke would find its next chance: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with the Vengador is compiled from the following sources: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 144; Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 143; Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 124; Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1817–1863 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2014), 1076–77; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; “Naval Intelligence,” Observer, September 15, 1828; Correspondence (Class B) 1828, 4; and Correspondence (Class A), 1828, 76.
  2. only to have it… hie off: Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 5.
  3. this wasn’t unusual: Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Watermen in the Atlantic World, 1444–1888,” PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2005; Emma Christopher, “Slave Ship Sailors: A Roundtable Response,” International Journal of Maritime History 19, no. 1 (June 2007): 333–41; and Stephen D. Behrendt, “Human Capital in the British Slave Trade,” in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, eds. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbles (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 78.
  4. perhaps Netto didn’t like his odds: If Netto’s paperwork was in order, this might not matter as, at least in some treaties, Britain had acquiesced to the right of vessels to carry (and thus retain in the case of condemnation) enslaved “bona fide household servants,” provided their identities were stipulated in the ship’s passport, which would have been issued from the voyage’s origin point. J. P. van Niekerk, “British, Portuguese, and American Judges in Adderley Street… (Part 1),” Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa 37, no. 11 (2004): 32, fn. 131.
  5. owned by… Jose de Cerqueira Lima: Correspondence (Class) A 1828, 76; Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta and Her Evil Sisters,” Journal of African American History 93 (2008): 517.
  6. an unfortunately accurate assessment: Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta.”
  7. despite the rising costs: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 133–34; David Joseph Blair, “All the Ships That Never Sailed,” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014, 323–24, citing William Law Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), 17, 135, and David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 138.
  8. penalties for slave traders: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 6.
  9. these punishments were… never applied: Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 35.
  10. Vengador… once known as the Principe de Guine: “From the London Gazette, Tuesday, Dec. 12: Admiralty Office,” London Times, December 13, 1826; Correspondence (Class A) 1827; and Correspondence (Class B) 1827, 46.
  11. sold that ship… at auction once again: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 128, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  12. Jose de Cerqueira Lima’s slave-trading outfit: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 143.
  13. had to have a certain number of British sailors: This was a requirement imposed by the Navigation Acts, which weren’t entirely repealed until 1849. J. H. Clapham, “The Last Years of the Navigation Acts,” English Historical Review 25, no. 99 (1910): 482, and Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19.
  14. “a most notorious Vessel” under its new name: Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 29.
  15. “purchased by Agents here and sent to the Brazils”: Ibid., 28.
  16. Esperanza was formerly known as… the Hope: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 128.
  17. already been condemned as a slaver captain: On the Trajano, which was also part of the controversies being discussed in this exchange of letters. Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 30.
  18. Hoop—it was originally of Dutch extraction: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 128.
  19. Turner… refused to let the schooner leave: Except where otherwise noted, the details of the Esperanza/Hope incident are drawn from Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 24–29.
  20. became ridiculously rich on a percentage of the profit: Padriac Xavier Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” Past & Present 225 (2014): 114.
  21. Kenneth Macaulay… prominent… public citizens: James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 308, and Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” 123–24, 127.
  22. “neither did he take the Bill of Sale, and the other Documents away”: Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 24–29.
  23. Ajuda: Just another name for Ouidah.
  24. Australia on the first available boat: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 4. Fourteen years of exile was just one of the possible punishments listed in the Slave Trade Felonies Act of 1811, but given how few people were actually prosecuted and how many ways there were to profit from the trade, the law’s overall value as a deterrent remains arguable. Emily Haslam, “Redemption, Colonialism and International Criminal Law: The Nineteenth Century Slave-Trading Trials of Samo and Peters,” in Past Law, Present Histories, edited by Diane Kirkby (Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 2012), 10.
  25. disposition of those ships once an officer left: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 128–29.
  26. captains even had to pay for the expenditures… of a prize: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8; and if one purchased it for use in the service, one had to pay for upkeep as well. Lubbock, Cruisers, 41.
  27. called prizes long before suppression: Daniel K. Benjamin, “Golden Harvest: The British Naval Prize System, 1793–1815” (unpublished, 2009), 2.
  28. disciplinary system… no stranger to the whip: Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 168–69, asserts that the rates of flogging and punishment after 1815 were consistent with those before, at least until much later in the nineteenth century. Thomas Malcomson, Order and Disorder in the British Navy, 1793–1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 189–220, provides an idea of what those rates were.
  29. accounts of prize crews resorting to such means: Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 102.
  30. resorting to violence if the crews felt it warranted: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5, quoting F. Harrison Rankin, The White Man’s Grave, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836).
  31. denying prize crews their daily allotment of alcohol: Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 102; Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 111–12.
  32. can’t absolve its sailors of any crimes against humanity: Wills, Envoys, 103–12.
  33. Prize duty created a lot of work: Ibid., 97–103, and Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 6.
  34. prize crews… never be discovered: By way of example: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  35. supplement his income: Wills, Envoys, 78–81.
  36. an ideal prize, no matter the risk: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 231–38.
  37. the money to which their work entitled them: Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” 125–26.
  38. ship purchases… through official channels: Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 129, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chaps. 5, 8, and 13.
  39. purchase slave-trading vessels from Lloyd’s: Lubbock, Cruisers, 144; Stephen D. Behrendt and Peter M. Solar, “Sail on, Albion: The Usefulness of Lloyd’s Registers for Maritime History, 1760–1840,” International Journal of Maritime History 26, no. 3 (2014): 568–86, detail the type and utility of historical information about ships, slave and non, that can be found in Lloyd’s sundry Registries and Lists.
  40. ties to the slave-trading industry: P. Hudson, “Slavery, the Slave Trade and Economic Growth,” in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, eds. by C. Hall, N. Draper, and K. McClelland (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), 36–59; Lubbock, Cruisers, 144; and Mark Landler, “Britain Grapples with Its Racist Past, from the Town Square to the Boardroom,” New York Times, June 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/world/europe/uk-slavery-trade-lloyds-greene-king.html.
  41. move that depot to Fernando Pó: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 249–64; Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 21–37; and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  42. one hell of an administrative error: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  43. stuck in Freetown: Ibid.
  44. effectively trapped in Sierra Leone: Ibid.
  45. no one in Freetown wanted the change, the commodore… included: Brown, “Fernando Po”; Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 21–37; and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  46. Captain Owen had his own tenders: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  47. brig and two schooners near “Whydah Roads”: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with the Presidente is compiled from the following sources: Lubbock, Cruisers, 145–46; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 145–46; Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter, 124–27; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; J. G. Muddiman, “H. M. S. the Black Joke,” Notes and Queries 172, no. 12 (March 1937): 200–201; “The Forty Pirates,” London Times, February 9, 1829; “Miscellaneous,” Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, February 12, 1829; and Correspondence (Class B) 1929, 72.
  48. upsurge in dangerous maritime activity: Blair, “All the Ships That Never Sailed,” and Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W. W. Norton; New York: Bonanza Books, 1935).
  49. erase the legal distinction between slave trading and piracy: John B. Hattendorf, “Maritime Conflict,” in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, eds. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 108.
  50. most pirates didn’t discriminate: It should be noted that some very much did mind, as multiple eighteenth-century examples can attest. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 165–73.
  51. supply the barracoons he kept… up and down the coast: For more on de Souza, see Silke Strickrodt, Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World: The Western Slave Coast, c.1550–c.1885 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 199–200; Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 323–29; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port (Oxford, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 155–88; Ana Lucia Araujo, “Forgetting and Remembering the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora, eds. Ana Lucia Araujo, Mariana P. Candido, and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 79–103; and Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery.
  52. “and I must have her”: Emphasis added.
  53. sailing at over seven knots: Lubbock, Cruisers, 155, says over seven, while Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, says six knots.
  54. the Surrey County Sessions House on Horsemonger Lane: On a modern map, this would now be the Inner London Crown Court on Harper Road.
  55. Zepherina… case… to the High Court of the Admiralty: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with the Zepherina and the distribution of its prize money is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 147; Winfield, British Warships, 1817–1863, 1076–77; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 6, 35–36; and John Haggard, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Admiralty, During the Time of the Right Hon. Lord Stowell, vol. 2, 1825–1832, ed. by George Minot (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853), 318–22.
  56. “in the same manner as if the seizure was made by the said ship or vessel”: Haggard, Reports of Cases.
  57. new captain, Lieutenant Henry Downes: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.

Chapter Five: El Almirante

  1. acting under the authority of Buenos Aires: “The Forty Pirates,” London Times, February 9, 1829, and Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 148.
  2. crew… couldn’t even be tried: “Money Market and City Intelligence,” London Times, November 8, 1828; “London, Saturday; February 14, 1829,” London Times, February 14, 1829; “An Extensive Failure, Caused by Speculations in Indigo, Took Place on Saturday at Liverpool,” London Times, June 22, 1829; and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 85.
  3. merchants… intimately tied to… slave trade: David Eltis, “The British Contribution to the Nineteenth Century Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Economic History Review 32, no. 2 (1979): 211–27; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 81–84; and Daniel Domingues da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade from Angola: A Port-by-Port Estimate of Slaves Embarked, 1701–1867,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 105–22, 27–28, citing Eltis, “The British Contribution,” 211.
  4. the impossibility of ending the slave trade: David Lambert, “Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery,” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007).
  5. detail the other nineteen: Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 37.
  6. beliefs… inherent inferiority of Africans: On the navy, specifically, Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 85, and Ray Costello, Black Salt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 95–106. Attitudes among policy makers and administrators, generally, Emma Christopher, “ ‘ ’Tis Enough That We Give Them Liberty?’ Liberated Africans at Sierra Leone in the Early Era of Slave-Trade Suppression,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion, eds. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 56–57; Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 208–9, 214; Leslie Bethell, “Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (1965): 63; Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986); and Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1964), this last has examples of this type of thinking but also is an example of same.
  7. globally dominant… position… strengthened… by suppression efforts: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), 165–66.
  8. Religion… source to justify slavery: Seymour Drescher, Abolition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 83–85.
  9. Black men… on Victory at… Trafalgar: Costello, Black Salt, 34, 58–59.
  10. empire’s planter-colonists in the Americas: Lambert, “Sierra Leone and Other Sites.”
  11. Britain’s holdings… expanded after… 1815: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 157.
  12. Jamaica’s planters… against ending… slave trade: Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 102–3, and William Law Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), 11–20.
  13. winning the war to preserve slavery: Mathieson, British Slavery.
  14. cheap way to maintain their business model: Eltis, Economic Growth, 17–27.
  15. realities of crop cultivation in the Americas: Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96–98; Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power (London: Penguin Books,1985), 25, who notes that while historically sugar had been grown as far north as Spain, that was in spite of the challenges of the climate.
  16. slavery… banned yet… freely profited from: Eltis, Economic Growth, 185–86, and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015).
  17. sugar… production process… fatal: Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery, 102; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 46–50; for the nuts and bolts of the operations on a British sugar plantation post-slave-trade abolition, Mathieson, British Slavery, 60–71. It should be noted that I am using “United States” broadly, and statements about systems of slavery as they relate to crop choice, reproductivity, mortality, and import are more about cultivation and geography more than national borders, as Louisiana’s distinctive practices and slaughterhouse reputation can attest. Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
  18. rapidly diverging systems of enslavement: Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery, 23–24, 52–54.
  19. harvesting sugarcane… men’s work: Ibid., 102–3, and Richard Follett, “Lives of Living Death,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 290, for an example of exceptions to the trend.
  20. enslavement… contravention of English precedent: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 333, and Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 43–49.
  21. cheaper source of equivalent labor: Enslaved women were apparently more expensive to acquire in Africa (Eltis, Economic Growth, 69), but usually comparatively cheaper to purchase in the Americas, or at least in the United States (Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh [Boston: Beacon Press, 2017]).
  22. United States… trade… domestic: Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain (New York: Basic Books, 2021).
  23. sugar reigned, and sugar killed: Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery, 102.
  24. claimed by disease: Leslie Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil and the Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” Journal of Latin American Studies 1, no. 2 (1969): 117–18.
  25. dying from the injury: Follett, The Sugar Masters.
  26. life expectancy… seven years: Sharon Landers, “Sugar Cultivation and Trade,” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 2, L–Z, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 1619.
  27. get as much work… before they passed on: Joseph Martin Mulhern, “After 1833: British Entanglement with Brazilian Slavery,” PhD diss., Durham University, 2018, 70, citing BFASS, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and Held in London, from Friday, June 12th, to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1840 (London: 1841), 516, provides a contemporary abolitionist perspective: “… in Cuba, ‘because no slave-holder can keep up a sufficient number of labourers by natural increase, he must be an annual purchaser in the slave market, and consequently every slave-holder is a slave-dealer.’ ” Howard M. Prince, “Slave Rebellion in Bahia, 1807–1835,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1972, 54, quotes a nineteenth-century British consul in Brazil, “the annual mortality on many slave plantations is so great, that unless their numbers were augmented from abroad the whole slave population would become extinct in the course of about twenty years; the proprietors act on the calculation that it is cheaper to buy male slaves than to rear Negro children.”
  28. an expected business expense: Prince, “Slave Rebellion in Bahia,” 54; Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Eltis, Economic Growth, 192, 321; and Follett, “Lives of Living Death,” 290.
  29. slaveholders… acted accordingly: There is plentiful scholastic debate as to (a) why the British really did it, morals, economics, or a combination thereof, and as a corollary (b) were British slave colonies even still collectively profitable in regard to sugar cultivation and export. Eltis, Economic Growth, gets into it, but I’m not going to.
  30. slave trading spiked: Eltis, Economic Growth.
  31. demand for the products of those industries: Ibid., 46.
  32. in Brazil, the year of reckoning was 1830: Bethell, “The Independence of Brazil,” 146.
  33. Kearney… a particularly infamous example: Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), chap. 32, citing William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 73–75.
  34. resell the enslaved on board: Wills, Envoys, 85.
  35. first Commodore Collier, George… cause for ending his life: Ibid., 74–85.
  36. allegations of both incompetence and cowardice… published: Ibid., 78, referencing the original publication of William James, The Naval History of Great Britain (6 vols.) (London: Richard Bently, 1837).
  37. ennobling and sanctifying language for… their mission: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no 2 (1973): 234.
  38. selfless conception of their service: Wills, Envoys, 70–85.
  39. risk of being… a “prize Negro”… lowered: Costello, Black Salt, 73, and Charles R. Foy, “Eighteenth Century ‘Prize Negroes,’ ” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (2010): 379–93.
  40. definition of “British” was explicitly expanded: Costello, Black Salt, 35.
  41. every vessel… one to four Black seamen: John Rankin, “Nineteenth-Century Royal Navy Sailors,” African Diaspora 6, no. 2 (2014): 179–95, and John Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” in The Suppression of the Slave Trade, eds. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 95–121.
  42. some diversity… could be found on board: Rankin, “Nineteenth-Century Royal Navy Sailors.”
  43. separate and/or sub-Anglo races unto themselves: Seymour Drescher, “The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism,” Social Science History 14, no. 3 (1990): 415–50; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), and Ex. Thomas Winterbottom, “Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (September 1825),” in The African Repository and Colonial Journal, vol. 1, edited by the American Colonization Society (Washington City: 1826; New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967), 193–204.
  44. demoted, with… regrets, for this reason: Costello, Black Salt, 95–99.
  45. English translations… the “Accou” language: Wills, Envoys of Abolition, 104.
  46. “aguadiente [sic]”: Henry Downes, Logbook of HMS SYBILLE and HMS BLACK JOKE 1827–1829 (LOG/N/41). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
  47. “no supplies of fresh stock except at long intervals”: Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 161.
  48. “cruising, cruising, cruising, and very unprofitably too”: Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter, 168.
  49. sketched while at sea: A few of his sketches still survive at the National Maritime Museum.
  50. anything to relieve the tedium: Brian Lavery, Life in Nelson’s Navy (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2007), chap. 4.
  51. where sailors’ advances… welcomed: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9, and Peter Leonard, The Western Coast of Africa: Journal of an Officer Under Captain Owen. Records of a Voyage in the Ship Dryad in 1830, 1831, and 1832 (Philadelphia: E. C. Mielke, 1833), 34–35.
  52. the 29th Article of War: “If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial.” Barry Richard Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.
  53. buggery… carried a death sentence: Indecency was a bit harder to pin down, in part because enumerating every possible sexual impropriety a sailor might conceive would have been prohibitive in more ways than one. Ibid., 67.
  54. HMS Africaine: Barry Richard Burg, “The HMS African Revisited: The Royal Navy and the Homosexual Community,” Journal of Homosexuality 56 (2009): 173–94, and Burg, Boys at Sea.
  55. Downes… service on the Africaine… tour to Asia: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 302.
  56. perceived sexual transgressions… on its decks: Burg, “The HMS African Revisited,” 178.
  57. a ship only 154 feet in length: Burg, Boys at Sea, 129, and Burg, “The HMS African Revisited,” 182.
  58. the sex would have been extremely difficult to miss: Burg, “The HMS African Revisited,” 183–86.
  59. pious in the manner of his day: Which is to say after his service he cofounded a naval mission to send a series of ships to proselytize in Japan, and that just seems like it’s above and beyond the average expression of faith, even in the aggressively evangelical context of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Robert S. G. Fletcher, “ ‘Returning Kindness Received?’ Missionaries, Empire and the Royal Navy in Okinawa, 1846–57,” English Historical Review 125, no. 514 (2010): 612–20.
  60. clearing their captain of wrongdoing: Burg, “The HMS African Revisited,” 191.
  61. acted surreptitiously enough… ignore them: Burg, Boys at Sea, 66; there is potentially one known incident of Downes reporting homosexual activity on Africaine, depending on the level of coincidence required for both a Lieutenant Downe and a Lieutenant Downes to be serving as two of the four lieutenants on the same ship. If it’s the same man, a witness approached him complaining of two men “committing unclean acts in the forechains.” (The chains were “the place where the leadsman stood to cast the lead for the purpose of taking soundings; forward near the bows and outside the bulwarks, directly over the water” [Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 233]). He duly reported it to the captain, but since there was no evidence, it came to naught. If that seems too close to informing for comfort, compare his behavior to that of his coworker, the lieutenant who heard word in the wee hours of the morning that a different pair of men clad in only their shirts were “lying together” on the deck. That guy immediately grabbed two mids who were close by, rounded up the quartermaster and master of arms as well, and ordered this newly formed posse to interrupt the coitus and catch the offenders in the act. For what it’s worth, they were also too late, and nothing came of that, either, but clearly Downes did rather less than he could have, even when the opportunity presented itself, to zealously guard against the supposed scourge of homosexual sex (Burg, Boys at Sea, 131).
  62. the notorious slaver El Almirante: The account of Black Joke’s encounter with El Almirante is compiled from the following sources: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 146–48; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 5; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 152–53, 156; O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 302; Joseph Allen, The New Navy List and General Record (London: Parker, Furnivall, and Parker, 1850), 94, 175; Rif Winfield, British Warships, 1817–1863 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2014), 1076–77; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Geoffrey Marsh Footner, Tidewater Triumph (Centerville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1998); Downes, Logbook; Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 6, 22–23; Correspondence (Class A) 1830, 76, 105–12; and J. G. Muddiman, “H. M. S. the Black Joke,” Notes and Queries 172, no. 12 (March 1937): 200–201
  63. letters… warned… escaping capture: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.

Chapter Six: Carolina

  1. promotions rained down on the crew: As did songs—Henry Downes, Logbook of HMS SYBILLE and HMS BLACK JOKE 1827–1829 (LOG/N/41). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, contains two composed in honor of the action, questionable bits of transcription enclosed in brackets:

    Come all you gallant sailors bold/and listen to my song.

    The truth to you I’ll tell/although not very long.

    It is of a Noble Brig my Boys/The Black Joke is her name

    Commanded by bold Downes/a man of well known fame.

    It was on the first of February/as you must understand

    Along the Coast of Africa/Not very far from land.

    We cruised about the Leagues/and their[sic] we did espy

    a Brig with Spanish Colours/Which proved our Enemy.

    And now the time arived[sic]/To show ourselves like men

    For sweeping of our [repell]/It was our full Design.

    And as we came up to her/We gave to her a gun

    Old Neptune sat upon the waves/a laughing at the fun.

    Be Cool and steady my brave boys/Our Captain he did say

    Before this day is Ended/We will show them British Play

    Although their force is greater/We ne’er shall yield to [them]

    For ere the setting of the sun/Their Colours we’ll pull down.

    Our men as bold as lions/Unto their Quarter flew

    With Courage bold Undaunted/We hoisted Colours Blue.

    Like hearts of Oak we boarded her/She tried to get away

    [Four thirty] of her bravest men/Upon her Decks did Lay.

    And as the battle Raged/In Dismal and [Surprise]

    The Spanyards [sic] fled from their [quarters]/and aloud for mercy cried.

    Give us our lives and liberty/From you we ask no more

    The Brig and all her slaves/and also [sic] of [great store].

    Their’s [sic] Downes for ever my brave Boys/And all his Valiant Crew

    Who bravely beat the Spanyards[sic]/And brought their Courage low.

    Likewise our gallant Commodore/and all the Sybille’s men

    and all the force that they can bring/shall ne’er Conquer them.

    by “Thomas [Larou], one of the Black Jokes Crew on 1 Feb 1829”

    But that little brig the Black Joke

    That brig of high reknown

    She did engage the Almirante

    And hauled her colours down

    Here’s a health to all the Black Joke’s crew

    And may that health go [round]

    I hope they’ll see many happy days

    When they are homeward bound

    author unknown

  2. slated for a promotion… join them as a lieutenant: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9.
  3. the Brazilian brigantine Carolina: The account of Black Joke’s encounter with Carolina and the subsequent adjudication is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sward Books, 2020), 156; Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1817–1863 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2008), 1076–77; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 55–56, 71; and Colonies and Slaves, vol. 19, 1831.
  4. tacit… coordination… entirely expected: Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 31–34, 57, 62–63; Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 87; and William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 120–21.
  5. legitimate or no, if it didn’t have to: Edward Keene, “A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy,” International Organization 61, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 311–39.
  6. commercial passport… issued… since at least the seventeenth century: John B. Hattendorf, “Maritime Conflict,” 105, in The Laws of War, ed. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 98–115.
  7. catch someone red-handed and full-berthed: A demonstration of how the establishment of an equatorial boundary impacted the suppression effort can be found in Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 122–23.
  8. ignorant of slave traders’ lies… complicit in them: Alexandre Vieira Ribeiro, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Bahia, 1582–1851,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, eds. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 139–40.
  9. enslaved people physically present: J. P. van Niekerk, “British, Portuguese, and American Judges in Adderley Street… (Part 1),” Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa 37, no. 1 (2004): 18–19, and Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions,” 86–87.
  10. even if the hold was just as empty: For instance, Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  11. “beyond what it may otherwise receive from such Evidence”: Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 56.
  12. every conceivable incentive to lie: David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 138–39, 161.
  13. picking up the Hosse… again: The account of the dispositions of Hosse and El Almirante is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; as the “Josse” in Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 157, 187; Correspondence (Class A) 1828, 3, 69–70; Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 71–72; Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 29–30; and Correspondence (Class A) 1830, 10, 76, 105–12.
  14. inescapably noxious and unbearably nauseating: By way of example: “noxious smell” in Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 108; “filth so foul and stench so offensive as not to be imagined,” in Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 87–88; “the stench from the holds being almost insupportable,” in Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 13; “the smell of slaves was as strong as if they had still been on board,” in Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 16; “stench at times was almost beyond endurance,” in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), chap. 2; “it was said in Charleston, South Carolina, that when the wind blew a certain way people could smell a slave ship before they could see it” (emphasis original), in Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 202; and “a ship that stank of excrement, so that, as with any slaver, ‘You could smell it five miles down wind,’ ” in Daniel P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 113.
  15. smell the presence of the enslaved on board: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9, and Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 164.
  16. the Mixed Commission had, too: Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions,” 86.
  17. incidence of both diseases dropped precipitously: James Watt, “Some Forgotten Contributions of Naval Surgeons,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 759.
  18. “pissing from his hammock upon the deck”: Barry Richard Burg, Boys at Sea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 67.
  19. fundamental element of daily shipboard life in the Royal Navy: Thomas Malcomson, Order and Disorder in the British Navy: 1793–1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 84–86.
  20. less rigorous… cleaning… punishment… excelled: Rediker, The Slave Ship, chap. 7.
  21. cleaned whenever the captain happened to decide: Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 108.
  22. There was usually a surgeon: Apparently Brazilian ships were generally known to not carry doctors. David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (1978): 57.
  23. a corpse left to rot beneath the living: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 6, and Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, 60, detail the same incident.
  24. bodies dead of suffocation in the hold: Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 106–7, and Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833), 134.
  25. flesh rubbed off from the motion of the ship: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 2.
  26. Bight of Biafra… worst… mortality rates… region: Northrup, “African Mortality”; Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 101–2.
  27. did not have access to the same supplies and… knowledge: Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 86, and again, the presence and qualifications of medical personnel on slave ships could be a hit or miss affair. Rediker, The Slave Ship; Northrup, “African Mortality,” 57; and Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 69–70.
  28. “with few exceptions, either are, or have been ill”: Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 229; however, how much of Fernando Pó’s eventual reputation was the result of the upcoming epidemic and how much was manufactured by the pro–Sierra Leone faction is a bit of an open question, Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 249–64.
  29. “cuts the slight thread of his existence”: Peter Leonard, The Western Coast of Africa: Journal of an Officer Under Captain Owen. Records of a Voyage in the Ship Dryad in 1830, 1831, and 1832 (Philadelphia: E. C. Mielke, 1833), 66–67.
  30. leprosy, elephantiasis, and guinea worm: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 3.
  31. climate, as well as water quality: James Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account of the Western Coast of Africa Embracing a Topographical Description of its Shores, Rivers, and Settlements…(London: S. Highly, 1831), 334–41, 360–62; potential misdiagnosis of hepatitis in areas with yellow fever, Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 218.
  32. disappear, never to be heard from again: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 62–64; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 2; Rediker, The Slave Ship, chap. 9; and Lubbock, Cruisers, 108–11, for a particularly harrowing example of ophthalmia on board a slaver.
  33. suicide on slave ships was not uncommon: Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 172–74, 176–79, and Robert L. Stevenson, “Jumping Overboard: Examining Suicide, Resistance, and West African Cosmologies During the Middle Passage,” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2018.
  34. Once was in 1823: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 269–83.
  35. the other was in 1829: Ibid., 201.
  36. over 25 percent… succumb to a terrifying malady: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  37. Black Joke… departed… April 13: Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 56.
  38. first case… colonial secretary’s office: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 223 (Case I: Loughnan).
  39. Eden arrived May 1: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  40. boat trip to the Scarcies River on May 4: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 229 (Case II: Gibson).
  41. Bannister, who’d barely been in the colony a year: Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Bannisters and Their Colonial World: Family Networks and Colonialism in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, eds. Karen Dubunsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 62–63.
  42. succumbing to a relapse a few months later: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 214–15 (Case V: Banister [sic]).
  43. apprentice of… Savage was fifth: Ibid., 216–17 (Case V: Williams).
  44. sixth case… Judge Jackson’s house: Ibid., 214 (Case VI: Jackson).
  45. Sybille’s prize crew was dead: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  46. Eden… arriving in Sierra Leone in early May: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 237–42.
  47. reasons that many distrusted… Owen: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 258–59, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  48. what the commodore might do about it: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 237–42.
  49. during one such episode: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  50. commodore… kept a clean and well-run ship: Ibid.
  51. connection between… illnesses and… insects: Watts, Epidemics and History, 213–68, on the evolution and impact of knowledge of yellow fever and malaria.
  52. in those not born to the West African coast: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 36–39.
  53. 1823 and 1829… near-identical weather pattern: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 204–10.
  54. “[reconcilable], if not to be anticipated”: Ibid., 210.
  55. bad air… method of transmission… illnesses: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 36–39.
  56. the most advanced knowledge available in 1831: And it was, actually. Ibid., 22.
  57. Sybille would uneventfully capture the Panchita: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 241, 244–47; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 23; and Correspondence (Class A) 1829, 26–28.
  58. overcrowded with the sick and dying: Grindal Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  59. Eden… caught it from the town: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 201–68, for a full accounting of the believed origins and progress of the 1829 epidemic, as well as conclusions drawn contemporaneous to the epidemic’s conclusion and aftermath.
  60. all manner of fevers one might contract: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 13–14, 29.
  61. newcomers and those possessed of “weak constitutions”: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 120–51. It should be noted that Boyle regards malaria as another affliction entirely and also mentions some extreme symptoms of what he refers to as “endemic” or “local bilious remittent fever” or “Sierra Leone fever” that are more analogous to yellow fever. However, Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 13, notes that “remittent fever” in primary sources of this period usually refers to what we now know as malaria, which seems, at least to this untrained eye, about right for the illness Boyle describes.
  62. staff of the Mixed Commission were already sick: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 211–30.
  63. excuses at the ready… for why: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 251, and Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions,” 87–88.
  64. 1829 didn’t help matters: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 102.
  65. British… Brazilian commissioner, did survive it: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 212 (Case XXVIII: De Paiva, though his wife succumbed), 214 (Case VI: Jackson).
  66. a full-blown epidemic was raging: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 142–43.
  67. “truest characteristics of the existence of the disorder”: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 203.
  68. there’s even a map: Ibid., 256–57.
  69. Downes… met up with Captain Owen… May 27: Henry Downes, Logbook of HMS SYBILLE and HMS BLACK JOKE 1827–1829 (LOG/N/41). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
  70. invalided home… May 30, 1829: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9, and Lubbock, Cruisers, 148.
  71. Downes would never again serve on a ship: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 302.
  72. With the exception of the Primrose… and Clinker: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  73. Kroomen… thought to be more immune: John Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 111–13.
  74. 57… from the Sybille and its famous tender: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.

Chapter Seven: Cristina

  1. Providencia… sailing as the Fama de Cadiz… near Ouidah: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9.
  2. concerns regarding the quantities of slavers: Ibid.
  3. “Bartholomew Diaz, about the beginning of the fifteenth century”: Peter Leonard, The Western Coast of Africa: Journal of an Officer Under Captain Owen. Records of a Voyage in the Ship Dryad in 1830, 1831, and 1832 (Philadelphia: E. C. Mielke, 1833), 9.
  4. levels Collier… worried about a few months prior: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  5. even (or perhaps especially) in an epidemic: Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Transoceanic Mortality,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–118; David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (1978): 47–64; Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) and Sowanade M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
  6. Nothing could be done… short of capturing them: In fact, critics of the squadron asserted that the suppression effort made the practices of the slave trade more inhumane, which wasn’t an inaccurate critique, Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” Slavery and Abolition 1, no. 1 (2010): 99–115.
  7. No one took Collier up on it: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  8. Collier, unsurprisingly, disliked this idea: Ibid.
  9. rules governing the appearance of its officers: J. Holman, A Voyage round the World (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1834), 383–85, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  10. the commodore was a protégé of Nelson’s, for goodness’ sake: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 159–60.
  11. increasingly testy letters concerning… beards: Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 137–38; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8; and Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 140.
  12. sometimes with genuinely deleterious impact: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 8.
  13. told the captain that he was not to chase slavers: Ibid., chap. 9.
  14. under orders not to interfere: Ibid., chaps. 8, 9, and Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign: 1826–1834,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 253, 258–59.
  15. “quite impossible for the measure to be carried out”: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 252, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  16. he felt it was good for the men: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  17. “every vegetable in great perfection and abundance”: Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833), 216–17.
  18. the Victualling Board dropped the idea: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  19. Kroomen… not being paid comparably: Ibid.
  20. a thousand residents at any given time: Padriac Xavier Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 65, and David A. Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka: Participation by African and Pacific Island Sailors in Euroamerican Maritime Frontiers,” International Journal of Maritime History 6, no. 2 (1994): 93.
  21. well-established Kru neighborhood and community: Diane Frost, “Diasporan West African Communities: The Kru in Freetown & Liverpool,” Review of African Political Economy 29, no. 92 (2002): 285–300.
  22. prize money earned by Squadron ships: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  23. paid less than many of his merchant counterparts: Brian Lavery, Life in Nelson’s Navy (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2007), chaps. 1 and 4.
  24. 2 to 3 percent of the annual national income: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), 150.
  25. United States spends on its military today (over 3 percent): Based on US gross national income (2019) $21.69 trillion, military spending (2019) $732 billion, for 3.37 percent. SIPRI, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2019,” https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/fs_2020_04_milex_0.pdf.
  26. largest empire ever recorded in the… world: The empire didn’t actually reach this size until the early twentieth century, Niall Ferguson, Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 43, but the point remains.
  27. prize ships were widely available nearly everywhere one served: Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 231.
  28. eventually (somewhat) duly paid: Padriac Xavier Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions,” Past & Present 225 (2014): 113–42.
  29. consistent access to prizes: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 231, 234–38.
  30. the reality didn’t exactly live up to the hype: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 4; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), Introduction; and John Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 95–121 (99).
  31. apportioned among the ship’s complement based on rank and rating: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 232–33, 235; and Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 6, for how prize apportionment continued to evolve.
  32. they were paid like seamen, not as seamen: The headman was paid more, akin to a petty officer.
  33. They didn’t have a rating: Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” 97.
  34. Liberia and collectivized by language: Jane Martin, “Krumen ‘Down the Coast’: Liberian Migrants on the West African Coast in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 3 (1985): 401–2, 405–6; L. B. Breitborde, “City, Countryside and Kru Ethnicity,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 61, no. 2 (1991): 187, 189–91; and Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka,” 91–92.
  35. swimming, diving, and boating… before Europeans arrived in Africa: G. E. Brooks, The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century (Newark, DE: Liberian Studies Association in America, 1972).
  36. discouraging efforts to teach its sailors how to do it: Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1327–55 (1327, 1331); Kevin Dawson, “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora,” in Navigating African Maritime History, ed. Carina E. Ray and Jeremy Rich (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 86, 95, 97; Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka,” 85–86; and Thomas Malcomson, Order and Disorder in the British Navy: 1793–1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 129; this policy would begin to change in the 1830s (Brian Lavery, Royal Tars: The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy [London: Conway Publishing; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010], 336).
  37. useful hires on all sorts of marine craft: Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka,” 97, 98; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 3; and Brooks, The Kru Mariner.
  38. distinct from any other African tribal group in the area: For example, W. R. Greg, Past and Present Efforts for the Extinction of the African Slave Trade (London: Ridgway, 1840), 83–84; T. R. Griffith, “On the Races Inhabiting Sierra Leone,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 16 (1887): 303–4; E. J. Burton, “Observations on the Climate, Topography, and Diseases of the British Colonies in Africa,” Provincial Medical & Surgical Journal (1840–1842) 3, no. 13 (1841): 250.
  39. functioned… efficiently as any other unit of sailors or marines: Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron,” 97.
  40. on his tribesmen’s behalf and at their behest: Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 104.
  41. indigenous knowledge… invaluable: Brooks, The Kru Mariner.
  42. WAS could not have functioned… without the Kroomen: Rankin, “British and African Health,” 97; Brooks, The Kru Mariner; and Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka.”
  43. sell their share to their boozier British crewmates: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  44. suggestions on how it might address the problem: Ibid.
  45. complement was sufficient… could not be moved: Ibid.
  46. between debtor’s prison and the Royal Navy: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1986), 158–59; Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 60–61; and Stephen Taylor, Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 224.
  47. smugglers knew their way around a boat: Rodger, Wooden World, 170–71; Brunsman, The Evil Necessity, 60–61; and Taylor, Sons of the Waves, 224.
  48. Thomas Atkinson of Liverpool: Taylor, Sons of the Waves, 480.
  49. a system of patronage in which favors were currency: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  50. neither Fielder nor Atkinson would ever see England again: Taylor, Sons of the Waves, 483.
  51. complete survey… at the instant of capture: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  52. gone back to England on June 8: James Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account of the Western Coast of Africa Embracing a Topographical Description of Its Shores, Rivers, and Settlements (London: S. Highly, 1831), 214.
  53. the only non-British commissioner in Freetown: Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 159.
  54. opposite numbers… came into being in 1819: Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 79–81.
  55. a very limited set of options for future employment: Leslie Bethell, “Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (1965): 84–89.
  56. on board one of the Sybille’s condemned prizes: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  57. and on such little evidence: Ibid.
  58. commodore… protective of those who served under him: For example, ibid., and Lubbock, Cruisers, 159–60.
  59. Butterfield… serve in the navy for sixty-one years: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 156.
  60. Le Hardy… centuries of prominence in Jersey: Ibid., 646.
  61. Turner was extremely popular: Lubbock, Cruisers, 140.
  62. practical realities of service on the coast: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  63. dry bedding was worth worrying about: Ibid.
  64. as hated… Turner had been liked: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  65. Harvey… no one publicly accused him of anything: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 59–60, and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 54–57.
  66. £10 per head to £5 the next year: Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 236.
  67. “in command of H.M. tender BLACK JOKE”: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  68. Parrey… performance in the WAS… promoted: Lubbock, Cruisers, 148–49; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; and O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 863–64.
  69. had his officer’s commission confirmed: O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 863–64.
  70. a rescue mission: Account of Black Joke’s rescue of Cristina is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Lubbock, Cruisers, 207; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 163; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Foreign Slave Trade (1837), 50; and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 21–22, 23.
  71. after twenty years living in Sierra Leone: Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account, 219.
  72. so many children—died: Benjamin N. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 27–36, provides more context on transatlantic child enslavement during this period.
  73. Parrey, his once and current lieutenant: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  74. continue to serve where he was needed: Parrey would receive his promotion to commander a few months later in February 1830 (Lubbock, Cruisers, 207).

Chapter Eight: Manzanares

  1. for which Black Joke was awarded prize money: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 22.
  2. William Coyde… gave him command: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9, and Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 207.
  3. served… in Britain’s First Burmese War: John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Vol. 3, Part 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831), 40–50, 62–63, 66, 81, 108–10; William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 6 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1901), 243–44, 249.
  4. the Spanish brigantine Manzanares: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with Manzanares is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 167; Lubbock, Cruisers, 207; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Correspondence (Class B) 1829, 159; Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 25–26, 28–29, 98; Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 10, 88–89; and Letter (1832), 10–11.
  5. Shipboard slave revolts were not… uncommon: Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 63–66.
  6. Henriqueta… had one on its third voyage: Great Britain, British and Foreign State Papers, 1826–1827, London H.M.S.O., 366.
  7. a fourth of the enslaved may have died in the uprising: The then captain, likely Cardozo dos Santos, claimed only 18 enslaved people died due to the revolt; however, Pennell, British Consul to Brazil, reveals that other reports placed the number much higher, noting that though Henriqueta was authorized to bring 600 enslaved people on the voyage, only 441 actually made it into port. Great Britain, British and Foreign State Papers, 366.
  8. “was of necessity in an unclean and unhealthy condition”: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1830, 29.
  9. Coyde would not retain the captaincy: He would, however, achieve his promotion to lieutenant the following year, in October 1831. Navy List, Corrected to the 20th of June, 1834 (London: John Murray, 1834), 33.
  10. McKinnel took a stroll: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Lubbock, Cruisers, 159–61; and Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 9.
  11. “nor did he suffer any inconvenience from it afterwards”: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  12. “surpassed anything I had ever experienced”: Ibid.
  13. best judgment as to when it was time to go: Ibid.
  14. and Gordon shouldered it: Ibid.
  15. An officer of long experience: John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Part 3 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 224–27; Constance Oliver Skelton and John Malcolm Bulloch, Gordons Under Arms (Aberdeen, Scotland: University Press, 1912), 28–30.
  16. Both of his brothers had already died: Skelton and Bulloch, Gordons Under Arms, 213–14, 264.
  17. the liberation of several thousand enslaved Africans: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chaps. 8 and 9.
  18. left the coast in the person of Commodore Collier: Lubbock, Cruisers, 161–62, details Collier’s send-off from St. Helena.

Chapter Nine: Dos Amigos

  1. requisite materials from Fernando Pó: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9.
  2. when compared to… betimes the colonial government of Sierra Leone: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 255–57, 260.
  3. drained away much of that support: Ibid., 262.
  4. to hide the truth of the situation: Ibid., 259, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  5. “as fatal as Sierra Leone, and that is saying a great deal”: Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833), 152.
  6. Spain had a viable claim to the island: Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
  7. Nicholls, who’d been serving as the governor of Ascension: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 259–60, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  8. those charged with administering the suppression effort: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 249–52, 260, and Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 45.
  9. the Bubi were nearly wiped out: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 261.
  10. the resulting near-complete lack of oversight: Ibid., 260–61; Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 128–44, provides a comprehensive overview of Owen’s time on the coast during this period.
  11. hied off to service on the South America Station: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 261, and Paul G. Cornell, “Owen, William Fitzwilliam,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4 (University of Toronto/Université Laval, revised 1979), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/owen_william_fitz_william_8E.html.
  12. Fernando Pó was toast: Brown, “Fernando Po,” 261, and Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery.
  13. Lumley, had died… in 1828: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  14. four different acting lieutenant governors had rotated through the position: A drama-filled series of incidents in its own right, the quick rundown is that Lumley had been in office for only two months after succeeding a guy (Denham) who’d had the gig for only one month. Lumley was followed by Samuel Smart for three months, who passed it off to Henry John Ricketts, who had a bit of a booze-assisted breakdown after the 1829 epidemic, at which point there was functionally a soft coup attempt among the European residents, creating factional divides until the arrival of a senior military officer, Augustine Fitzgerald Evans of the 2nd West India Regiment, and Ricketts promptly decamped to England. Evans was declared acting governor for “a few weeks,” until the arrival of an even more senior officer, Alexander Maclean Fraser of the Royal African Colonial Corps, who then declared himself acting governor and interfered in the functioning of the Mixed Commission for a month or three by refusing to swear in one of the original instigators of the whole affair as a judge. That was pretty much the state of things when the officially promoted Alexander Findlay arrived in April 1830 to take over and put an end to the shenanigans, which didn’t immediately work, as Fraser spent the next year contesting Findlay’s appointment. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 171–78.
  15. “by bringing many thousands of slaves to this colony”: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  16. greater lengths to avoid the Black Joke specifically: Blair, “All the Ships That Never Sailed,” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014, 81, fn. 8, citing Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter.
  17. “without a European to direct them”: Janes W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 337.
  18. resettled Black residents from Nova Scotia and Jamaica: Padriac Xavier Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 28, 30–31.
  19. this first attempt failed fairly quickly: Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, and Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors.
  20. over five hundred Jamaican Maroons to quell the unrest: Walker, The Black Loyalists.
  21. “[Total] 15,081”: Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations of Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1827), 16–17.
  22. young enough to have just left school: Walker, The Black Loyalists, 337.
  23. arranged for four hundred locals to… kill everyone: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  24. HMS Thistle… killing two and injuring several more: Ibid., chap. 14.
  25. fever… killed twenty-seven members of the crew: Ibid., chap. 9.
  26. French slave traders… bigger problem that year: Ibid.
  27. willing to simply ignore the law, and the trade continued: Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000), 18.
  28. more stringently enforcing those already on the books: Ibid., 108.
  29. whistleblowers who informed… would serve no time: Ibid., 134–35.
  30. the French Squadron… detaining French slavers: Ibid., 146.
  31. That last one would prove the most difficult: Ibid., 141.
  32. things would get worse before they got better: Ibid., 141–43.
  33. really, it could do nothing else: Ibid., 143, 146–47.
  34. “seems to me to leave still much to be desired”: Ibid., 143.
  35. His opposite number: Vice Admiral C. E. Fleeming.
  36. colonial officials… apathetic and too often complicit: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 142, 144.
  37. changed the family’s last name accordingly: William Anderson, The Scottish Nation; or, the Surnames, Families, Literature, Honours, and Biographical History of the People of Scotland, vol. 3 (Mac–Zet) and Supplement (Edinburgh: A. Fullarton & Co., 1877), 322, and William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 952.
  38. berth to berth with scarcely a gap in service: O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 952.
  39. yet still had nothing to show for it: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9, and Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 207.
  40. “literally laugh at us as we pass”: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 127; Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 153; and Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 171.
  41. “or having slaves actually on board”: Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 149–51.
  42. France’s was the documentation of choice: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 126.
  43. if Britain wanted it, France almost certainly did not: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 79–81.
  44. Napoléon had brought… return of French slavery: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 17.
  45. French government’s complicity in slave trading: Ibid., 139.
  46. an international incident… waiting to happen: Ibid., 145.
  47. boarding French slavers… had to stop: Ibid., 146–147.
  48. a slew of anti-slave-trade and outright abolitionist ministers: Ibid., 148, and William Law Mathieson, England in Transition, 1789–1832 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), 263.
  49. France’s shift… to ally of suppression: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 138.
  50. Black Joke was patiently waiting offshore near the Cameroons River: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with and subsequent disposition of Dos Amigos is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 171–72; Lubbock, Cruisers, 207–9; Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, “The Slaving Brig Henriqueta and Her Evil Sisters,” Journal of African American History 93 (2008): 509–31; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 15–24, 34.
  51. poop tub: The giant defecation tubs were a standard slave ship feature, and somehow even more disgustingly inhumane than their function and location implies. Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), and Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007).
  52. leaders of African geographical areas and tribal groups: Ralph A. Austen, “The Metamorphoses of Middlemen: The Duala, Europeans, and the Cameroon Hinterland, ca. 1800–ca. 1960,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1983): 5–6.
  53. the quantities of food meant to go in them: Rediker, The Slave Ship.
  54. insurance would cover the loss of life… It did not: Ibid., chap. 8, and Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 1.
  55. trade… a sliver of what it had once been: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers.
  56. “the evidence of [de Muxica] is insincere and fictitious”: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 16–21.
  57. John “Magnificent” Hayes… his flagship, HMS Dryad: Lubbock, Cruisers.

Chapter Ten: Primero

  1. nothing was ever seen to fall out of the sky again: A tender of Sybille, Paul Pry, had a service-ending experience with a tornado as well when, during a chase, the weather prompted a munitions explosion on deck. The tender was limped into harbor and sold. Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9, and Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 150–51 (Paul Pry), 153 (additional example, HMS Redwing).
  2. sympathy for the exigencies of life at sea was available: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 21–24.
  3. entered into the Royal Navy’s Navy List: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  4. sent Plumper out to search for the Black Joke: Ibid., chap. 9, and Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 174.
  5. much the same as an actual French flag of the era: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  6. the captain of the new flagship, Dryad: Ibid., chap. 9.
  7. the fifth-rate frigate Dryad: Phoebe class, originally had thirty-six guns and subsequently had six more added. Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793–1817 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2008), 445–46, and Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1817–1863 (Yorkshire, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2014), 532–35.
  8. bogged down by the full-time job of running his own ship: Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965).
  9. Kroomen for boat work in the interior cease: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  10. so much biological cannon fodder: John Rankin, “British and African Health in the Anti-slave-trade Squadron” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Robert M. Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 95–121; Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 39, 105–6; and Stephen Taylor, Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 481
  11. attempting to put a medical officer on every prize crew: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  12. attached severe punishment to misconduct: Ibid.
  13. “an explanation thereof, might accompany our report of the case”: Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 15–16.
  14. “satisfied with the explanation given by Lieutenant Ramsay”: Ibid., 23.
  15. it was desperately in need of yet another refit: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  16. constructed by the Royal Navy… ship Hayes had run in the trials: Lubbock, Cruisers, 202.
  17. rechristening it the Fair Rosamond: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  18. head of squadrons in Jamaica and elsewhere: J. K. Laughton and Roger Morriss, “Hayes, John (1775–1838), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Lubbock, Cruisers, 200–202; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; and John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Vol. 2, Part 2 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 673–83.
  19. “he could build, rig, govern, and sail the ship with equal ease and credit”: Henry Huntley, Seven Years’ Service on the Slave Coast of Western Africa, vol. 1 (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1850), 143–44.
  20. “liberated” Africans… resold into slavery: Lubbock, Cruisers, 206, and Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  21. “contrary to custom”: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9. Hayes minced fewer words, calling it “a question too absurd for Their Lordships to entertain for a moment.”
  22. frivolous (if technically true in some aspects) charges: The Nautical Magazine (London) 1 (1832): 494–95.
  23. Speedwell… Cuban pirates in the early 1820s: Lubbock, Cruisers, 74, 209; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 178–79.
  24. the Spanish schooner Primero: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with Primero is compiled from the following sources: Lubbock, Cruisers, 209; Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary, 179; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 175; Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833), 104–7; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 24–25.
  25. “with sails shaking and booms cracking”: Lubbock, Cruisers, 209.
  26. primary indictments… on the home front: Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1964).
  27. slightly smaller than… a medium-size slaving vessel: Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), chap. 2, indicates 140 TB average.
  28. a number of exceedingly dirty monkeys: Ibid. notes that animals on slave ships were not uncommon; Lubbock, Cruisers, highlights the regular appearance of dogs on slave ships, and Dos Amigos had goats, Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831, 21.
  29. a slave deck that… measured only twenty-six inches: Leonard, Records of a Voyage.
  30. only two or three, and those were not always open: Rediker, The Slave Ship.
  31. the daily waste of urine and feces… pus and vomit: Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
  32. “one of the cleanest that ever was brought to the colony”: Leonard, Records of a Voyage.

Chapter Eleven: Marinerito

  1. a distanced, spare retelling of facts: Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2019).
  2. Primero… journey back to Sierra Leone: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 9.
  3. an astonishingly good result: Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), and David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (1978): 47–64.
  4. “Is this unparalleled cruelty to last for ever?”: Wills, Envoys of Abolition, emphasis original to Hayes.
  5. “I think it will appear in another light”: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9, and Wills, Envoys of Abolition.
  6. “enter into his thoughtless head”: Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833).
  7. awareness among the sailors… rationale for their service: Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009), 105–30, on sailor-authors’ awareness of and reaction to systemic issues in the broader context of the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries; see Wills, Envoys of Abolition, for an exploration specific to the WAS.
  8. kidnapping… on account of their hue: Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent of British Ships (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 18–22, 83.
  9. the general mindset in the WAS: Wills, Envoys of Abolition.
  10. USS Java: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with USS Java is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 175; Judd Scott Harmon, “Suppress and Protect: The United States Navy, the African Slave Trade, and Maritime Commerce, 1794–1862,” PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1977; and American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, vol. 7 (Washington: American Colonization Society, 1832; New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967).
  11. American interest was lower still: W. E. B. Dubois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1970); Harmon, “Suppress and Protect”; and William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969).
  12. continuing back to Norfolk, Virginia: American Colonization Society, The African Repository, vol. 7, 153–57.
  13. presented with a choice between three commands: Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012); Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9; Henry Huntley, Seven Years’ Service on the Slave Coast of Western Africa, vol. 1 (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1850), 143–46.
  14. get another opportunity to command: Huntley, Seven Years’ Service, 144–45.
  15. that October he would finally receive the promotion he sought: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  16. “a monotonous and idle absurdity”: Huntley, Seven Years’ Service, 301.
  17. “she was certainly her superior when going well ‘free’ ”: Ibid.,145.
  18. Fair Rosamond to the Bight of Benin: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 9.
  19. staffing the tenders: Ibid., chap. 11.
  20. dreamed and schemed of its being: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 249–64.
  21. no one was allowed on board this Marinerito: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with Marinerito is compiled from the following sources: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11; Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 174–76; Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, 177–81; Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 213–16; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Journal (1833), 87–88; and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1831.
  22. avoiding the Black Joke’s patrol area entirely, if possible: David Joseph Blair, “All the Ships That Never Sailed,” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014, 81 fn. 8, referencing Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter.
  23. his mate C. J. Bosanquet: William Richard O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 98–99.
  24. Hinde… had only been in the Royal Navy for two years: Ibid., 518.
  25. announced as a brig from the south: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5, and Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
  26. still in the… slave deck… if with slightly more space: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  27. “painful attitude necessary for the stowage of so large a number”: Leonard, Records of a Voyage.
  28. rowed to… receive their much-ballyhooed liberation: Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, chap. 5.
  29. died within four months of their arrival: Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever, 156.
  30. process was ostensibly meant to be liberatory: As a captain on the coast in later years put it, “…if [recaptive Africans] are not slaves their condition is so near it that I was unable to perceive the difference.” Costello, Black Salt, 37.
  31. jobs… in service of British empire: Richard Anderson, “The Diaspora of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans,” African Economic History 41 (2013): 101–38. For a non–Sierra Leonean example of these policies carried out, see Andrew Pearson, Distant Freedom: St Helena and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1840–1872 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 201–41.
  32. “angry when they found themselves still under control”: Leonard, Records of a Voyage.

Chapter Twelve: Regulo & Rapido

  1. Seaflower, Fair Rosamond, and the eldest, Black Joke: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 11.
  2. worthless for the commodore’s purposes: Ibid.
  3. “George IV put an end to his unpopularity by dying”: William Law Mathieson, England in Transition, 1789–1832 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), 263.
  4. forced to resign after only a year: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Admiralty (London: T. Dalton, 1979).
  5. he undoubtedly was a drinker: Steven Parissian, “George IV: The Royal Joke?,” BBC History, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/george_fourth_01.shtml.
  6. rather than the conservative Tories: Mathieson, England in Transition, 263–64, and Edith F. Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 48–76.
  7. working with France to finally effect real change: Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 149–53.
  8. insulted their diplomats at state dinners: Andrew Lambert, “Introducing William IV: A ‘Sailor King’?,” Georgian Papers Programme Blog, https://georgianpapers.com/2018/02/20/introducing-william-iv-sailor-king/.
  9. Neither of them would be on the next Admiralty board: Rodger, The Admiralty.
  10. popular support… in England was ebbing: William Ernest Frank Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: Pantheon Books, 1969), 126–27.
  11. dubious on the project of the Squadron as a whole: Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience, 48–76.
  12. enough tenders to patrol the coast for three years: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  13. cruise in the immediate vicinity of Freetown: Ibid.
  14. no more tenders… purchased for the West Africa Squadron: Ibid.
  15. near each other, usually in the Bights: Ibid.
  16. two heavily armed slavers: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with Regulo and Rapido is compiled from the following sources: Ibid.; Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 176–77; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 181–82; Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 219–24; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Journal (1833), 154–57; Correspondence (Class A & B) 1832; and Daniel P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 210–11.
  17. stories of the horrors of the Marinerito and slavers like it: Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 73, 86.
  18. abandoned the captain to the disarray: Lubbock, Cruisers, 218–19, and Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 5.
  19. Sharks… waiting for the inevitable bodies from above: Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), chap. 1.
  20. reverberated across the ocean: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  21. abolitionist sympathies he didn’t share: Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 187–88.
  22. had several serious offers: Ibid., 189.
  23. equipment clauses… would have prevented the incident: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 149–53.
  24. ridding the slave coast of nearly all French slavers: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.

Chapter Thirteen: Frasquita

  1. “unprecedented and improper”: Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), chap. 11.
  2. right about a forthcoming promotion: Ibid.
  3. being stuck… had a rather deleterious effect: Ibid.
  4. were everything navy-related not all the rage: Andrew Lambert, “Introducing William IV: A ‘Sailor King’?” Georgian Papers Programme Blog.
  5. reformist zeal… hadn’t yet flagged enough to ignore: Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1964).
  6. reform of the Church in Ireland: Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Admiralty (London: T. Dalton, 1979), and William Law Mathieson, England in Transition: 1789–1832 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920).
  7. just as disinterested… perhaps even more so: Edith F. Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 48–76.
  8. this… was not one of his better ideas: Basil Lubbock, Cruisers, Corsairs & Slavers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1993), 226.
  9. currently Commodore Schomberg: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  10. replace them both with Real Admiral Warren: Ibid.
  11. the same to Georges II and III: William Richard O’Byrne, Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1849), 1251.
  12. difficult mission several thousand miles apart: J. K. Laughton and Andrew Lambert, “Warren, Frederick (1775–1848), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004; accessed June 21, 2021; and Lubbock, Cruisers, 226.
  13. Brisk… commanded by… Edward Harris Butterfield: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  14. document the ship’s capabilities and fuel performance: Lubbock, Cruisers, 226.
  15. The policy was not well received: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  16. recaptive Africans placed around the nearby river: Ibid.
  17. little good to say about Fernando Pó: Ibid.
  18. prompted a relative ebb in the trade: Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000).
  19. they’d ideally have quite a few more: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  20. an impressive record during the Napoleonic Wars: Laughton and Lambert, “Warren, Frederick.”
  21. two court-martials notwithstanding: Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824), 414–16.
  22. Hayes happened to be near: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  23. only a day after Warren himself: Ibid.
  24. both crewed and condemned: Ibid.
  25. the Admiralty shot this solution down: Ibid.
  26. policy surrounding the sale of tenders: Ibid.
  27. Frasquita was summarily condemned: Account of Black Joke’s encounter with Frasquita is compiled from the following sources: Ibid.; Anthony Sullivan, Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2020), 187; Lubbock, Cruisers, 225–26; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Journal (1833), 171–74; and Correspondence (Class A & B) 1832.
  28. build, rather than source, an effective fleet: Lubbock, Cruisers, 169–99, for how the navy’s shipbuilding and design efforts evolved during this era.
  29. El Almirante… renamed Cherouka: Ibid., 225.
  30. these were his “pet” ships: Ibid., 227.
  31. didn’t reveal them to the Admiralty: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  32. brightest star over four difficult years: Ibid.
  33. something so clearly worth saving: Peter Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833).
  34. deliberately set the Black Joke ablaze: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11, and Lubbock, Cruisers, 226–27.
  35. lest they face the same fate: Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, chap. 11.
  36. Jamaica and Nantes, Bahia and Ouidah: Leonard, Records of a Voyage.
  37. more streamlined command structure: Lubbock, Cruisers.
  38. the settlement finally failed two years later: Robert T. Brown, “Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1973): 249–64.
  39. technologically and as an organization: Lubbock, Cruisers.
  40. gradualist approach in most… colonies: William Law Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929).
  41. abolished slavery for a second time in 1848: Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression.
  42. economic losses slaveholders sustained with broader abolition: Slave Compensation Act 1837, 1 & 2 Vict. c. 3.
  43. point of contention… for years to come: Richard Anderson, “The Diaspora of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans,” African Economic History 41 (2013): 101–38, and Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement.
  44. decades before anyone would call the battle for suppression won: Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London: Longman Group, 1975).

Valediction

  1. Fair Rosamond… anywhere in the world… how a slaver was built: Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, “In Search of the Cuban Slave Ship Dos Amigos,” ISLAS 1, no. 4 (2006): 22–30.
  2. Slave Compensation Act… 2015, when it was finally paid off: Kris Manjapra, “When Will Britain Face Up to Its Crimes Against Humanity?,” Guardian, March 29, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-to-its-crimes-against-humanity.